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Abstract. In the context of future climate change, understanding the nature and behaviour of ice sheets during warm intervals in Earth history is of fundamental importance. The late Pliocene warm period (also known as the PRISM interval: 3.264 to 3.025 million years before present) can serve as a potential analogue for projected future climates. Although Pliocene ice locations and extents are still poorly constrained, a significant contribution to sea-level rise should be expected from both the Greenland ice sheet and the West and East Antarctic ice sheets based on palaeo sea-level reconstructions. Here, we present results from simulations of the Antarctic ice sheet by means of an international Pliocene Ice Sheet Modeling Intercomparison Project (PLISMIP-ANT). For the experiments, ice-sheet models including the shallow ice and shelf approximations have been used to simulate the complete Antarctic domain (including grounded and floating ice). We compare the performance of six existing numerical ice-sheet models in simulating modern control and Pliocene ice sheets by a suite of five sensitivity experiments. We include an overview of the different ice-sheet models used and how specific model configurations influence the resulting Pliocene Antarctic ice sheet. The six ice-sheet models simulate a comparable present-day ice sheet, considering the models are set up with their own parameter settings. For the Pliocene, the results demonstrate the difficulty of all six models used here to simulate a significant retreat or re-advance of the East Antarctic ice grounding line, which is thought to have happened during the Pliocene for the Wilkes and Aurora basins. The specific sea-level contribution of the Antarctic ice sheet at this point cannot be conclusively determined, whereas improved grounding line physics could be essential for a correct representation of the migration of the grounding-line of the Antarctic ice sheet during the Pliocene.

Abstract. The shallow ice approximation (SIA) is commonly used in ice-sheet models to simplify the force balance equations within the ice. However, the SIA cannot adequately reproduce the dynamics of the fast flowing ice streams usually found at the margins of ice sheets. To overcome this limitation, recent studies have introduced heuristic hybrid combinations of the SIA and the shelfy stream approximation. Here, we implement four different hybrid schemes into a model of the Antarctic Ice Sheet in order to compare their performance under present-day conditions. For each scheme, the model is calibrated using an iterative technique to infer the spatial variability in basal sliding parameters. Model results are validated against topographic and velocity data. Our analysis shows that the iterative technique compensates for the differences between the schemes, producing similar ice-sheet configurations through quantitatively different results of the sliding coefficient calibration. Despite this we observe a robust agreement in the reconstructed patterns of basal sliding parameters. We exchange the calibrated sliding parameter distributions between the schemes to demonstrate that the results of the model calibration cannot be straightforwardly transferred to models based on different approximations of ice dynamics. However, easily adaptable calibration techniques for the potential distribution of basal sliding coefficients can be implemented into ice models to overcome such incompatibility, as shown in this study.