D. Vallot M. Schafer E. Welty Shad O’Neel T.C. Bartholomaus Y. Liu T. Riikila T. Zwinger J. Timonen Johnnie N. Moore J. Astrom 2014 <p><span>Over the next century, one of the largest contributions to sea level rise will come from ice sheets and glaciers calving ice into the ocean</span>^{<a id="ref-link-section-d44209e580" title="Moore, J. C., Grinsted, A., Zwinger, T. &amp; Jevrejeva, S. Semi-empirical and process-based global sea level projections. Rev. Geophys. 51, 484–522 (2013)." href="https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo2290#ref-CR1" data-track="click" data-track-action="reference anchor" data-track-label="link" data-test="citation-ref" aria-label="Reference 1" data-mce-href="https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo2290#ref-CR1">1</a>}<span>. Factors controlling the rapid and nonlinear variations in calving fluxes are poorly understood, and therefore difficult to include in prognostic climate-forced land-ice models. Here we analyse globally distributed calving data sets from Svalbard, Alaska (USA), Greenland and Antarctica in combination with simulations from a first-principles, particle-based numerical calving model to investigate the size and inter-event time of calving events. We find that calving events triggered by the brittle fracture of glacier ice are governed by the same power-law distributions as avalanches in the canonical Abelian sandpile model</span>^{<a id="ref-link-section-d44209e584" title="Bak, P., Tang, C. &amp; Wiesenfeld, K. Self-organized criticality: An explanation of the 1/f noise. Phys. Rev. Lett. 59, 381–384 (1987)." href="https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo2290#ref-CR2" data-track="click" data-track-action="reference anchor" data-track-label="link" data-test="citation-ref" aria-label="Reference 2" data-mce-href="https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo2290#ref-CR2">2</a>}<span>. This similarity suggests that calving termini behave as self-organized critical systems that readily flip between states of sub-critical advance and super-critical retreat in response to changes in climate and geometric conditions. Observations of sudden ice-shelf collapse and tidewater glacier retreat in response to gradual warming of their environment</span>^{<a id="ref-link-section-d44209e588" title="Luckman, A., Murray, T., de Lange, R. &amp; Hanna, E. Rapid and synchronous ice-dynamic changes in East Greenland. Geophys. Res. Lett. 33, L03503 (2006)." href="https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo2290#ref-CR3" data-track="click" data-track-action="reference anchor" data-track-label="link" data-test="citation-ref" aria-label="Reference 3" data-mce-href="https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo2290#ref-CR3">3</a>}<span>&nbsp;are consistent with a system fluctuating around its critical point in response to changing external forcing. We propose that self-organized criticality provides a yet unexplored framework for investigations into calving and projections of sea level rise.</span></p> application/pdf 10.1038/ngeo2290 en Nature Termini of calving glaciers as self-organized critical systems article