The Greenland ice sheet (GrIS) stores the largest amount of freshwater in the Northern Hemisphere and has been recently losing mass at an increasing rate. An eddy‐permitting ocean general circulation model is forced with realistic estimates of freshwater flux from the GrIS. Two approaches are used to track the meltwater and its trajectory in the ocean. We show that freshwater from western and eastern GrIS have markedly different fates, on a decadal time scale. Freshwater from west Greenland predominantly accumulates in Baffin Bay before being exported south down the Labrador shelf. Meanwhile, GrIS freshwater entering the interior of the Labrador Sea, where deep convection occurs, comes predominantly (∼80%) from east Greenland. Therefore, hosing experiments, which generally assume a uniform freshwater flux spatially, will not capture the true hydrographic response and regional impacts. In addition, narrow boundary currents are important for freshwater transport and distribution, requiring simulations with eddy‐resolving resolution.
Baffin Bay is a small marginal basin between Greenland and the Canadian Arctic (Figure 1a). It is approximately 550 km east-west and 1,400 km north-south, with broad shelves on the Greenland side and a deep central region (Tang et al., 2004). Based on two distinct periods of mooring observations in 2003-2006 and 2007-2009, net southward fluxes from the Arctic Ocean through Nares Strait were 0.71 0.09 and 1 03 0 11 . .
The annual mass loss (hereafter referred as discharge) from the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) is currently estimated to be around 1,100 Gt/yr, half of which is attributed to liquid runoff and the other half to solid discharge (Bamber et al., 2012(Bamber et al., , 2018van den Broeke et al., 2009). While liquid runoff includes surface runoff and subglacial discharge, solid discharge is a product of the ice velocity and the glacier flux gate, located around the glacier's grounding line (Figure 1a;Bamber et al., 2018). Although other frontal ablation processes (such as submarine melting) are also responsible for transforming Greenland's solid discharge into liquid freshwater delivered to the ocean, most of this solid discharge can be attributed to the formation of icebergs (i.e., calving). Between 10% and 50% of those icebergs melt in the fjord (Enderlin et al., 2016), and the remaining drifts into open ocean. Because Greenland is situated close to areas of dense water formation such as the Labrador Sea, it follows that its freshwater discharge could reduce surface water salinities and thus increase water column stability to the point where deep convection is reduced or halted, disturbing the Meridional Overturning Circulation (MOC). However, despite the fact that this discharge from Greenland has been increasing over the last 20 years (Bamber et al., 2018), such enhanced freshwater has not impacted the MOC yet (Böning et al., 2016) since most of it does not directly reach the convective region of the
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