Assessing ocean-forced, marine-terminating glacier change in Greenland during climatic warm periods and its impact on marine productivity

The Greenland Ice Sheet is decaying at an accelerating rate in response to climate change. Warm ocean waters moving through the fjords eventually meet the faces of marine-terminating glaciers, increasing melting and iceberg calving. In turn, these freshwater inputs are altering ocean circulation and ecosystems in coastal areas around Greenland but also farther afield in the North Atlantic with the potential to affect UK weather systems. It is now imperative to understand how ice-sheet decay will progress as our climate warms, as well as the knock-on effects on ocean circulation and marine productivity.
One way to determine which ice-ocean-marine ecosystem scenarios are analogues for future warming projections is to extend the record of modern observations back over the last 11,700 years of the Holocene using proxies from marine sediment cores. A few records of 20th Century iceberg calving and warm water encroachment exist around Greenland but there are no comprehensive, coupled records of past glacier change, ocean warming and marine productivity for earlier periods.

UKRI