Submarine melting and iceberg calving are two important processes that control mass loss from the terminus of tidewater glaciers. There have been significant efforts to quantify the effect of submarine melting on glacier calving, but controversy remains with conflicting studies indicating submarine melting can increase, decrease, or has minimal effect on calving. Here we show using a two‐dimensional full Stokes finite element model that submarine melt can alter the state of stress near the terminus and the changes in stress exert a first‐order control on the calving regime of marine terminating glaciers. The model calculates both the largest principal and maximum shear stresses and then maps out where tensile and shear failure occur for a range of melt rates and vertical melt profiles. We find that submarine melt initially promotes full thickness calving events. However, as the melt rate further increases, an overhang begins to form and resulting compressive stresses suppress full thickness calving. These results are relatively insensitive to basal friction. Moreover, our results suggest that submarine melting can both increase and decrease calving rates with the magnitude and sign of the effect determined by the shape of the melt profile and the relative magnitude of average melt rate. Despite the fact that calving is suppressed in some circumstances, the addition of submarine melt almost always increases the total mass loss. Overall, we find that relatively small amounts of submarine melt can destabilize glaciers, but calving and frontal ablation are increasingly controlled by submarine melt as it continues to increase.
Increased calving and rapid retreat of glaciers can contribute significantly to sea level rise, but the processes controlling glacier retreat remain poorly understood. We seek to improve our understanding of calving by investigating the stress field controlling tensile and shear failure using a 2‐D full‐Stokes finite element model. Using idealized rectangular geometries, we find that when rapidly sliding glaciers thin to near buoyancy, full thickness tensile failure occurs, similar to observations motivating height‐above‐buoyancy calving laws. In contrast, when glaciers are frozen to their beds, basal crevasse penetration is suppressed and calving is minimal. We also find that shear stresses are largest when glaciers are thickest. Together, the tensile and shear failure criteria map out a stable envelope in an ice‐thickness‐water‐depth diagram. The upper and lower bounds on cliff height can be incorporated into numerical ice sheet models as boundary conditions, thus bracketing the magnitude of calving rates in marine‐terminating glaciers.
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