Computation of a combined spherical-elastic and viscous-half-space earth model for ice sheet simulation

Abstract

This report starts by describing the continuum model used by Lingle & Clark (1985) to approximate the deformation of the earth under changing ice sheet and ocean loads. That source considers a single ice stream, but we apply their underlying model to continent-scale ice sheet simulation. Their model combines Farrell's (1972) elastic spherical earth with a viscous half-space overlain by an elastic plate lithosphere. The latter half-space model is derivable from calculations by Cathles (1975). For the elastic spherical earth we use Farrell's tabulated Green's function, as do Lingle & Clark. For the half-space model, however, we propose and implement a significantly faster numerical strategy, a spectral collocation method (Trefethen 2000) based directly on the Fast Fourier Transform. To verify this method we compare to an integral formula for a disc load. To compare earth models we build an accumulation history from a growing similarity solution from (Bueler, et al.~2005) and and simulate the coupled (ice flow)-(earth deformation) system. In the case of simple isostasy the exact solution to this system is known. We demonstrate that the magnitudes of numerical errors made in approximating the ice-earth system are significantly smaller than pairwise differences between several earth models, namely, simple isostasy, the current standard model used in ice sheet simulation (Greve 2001, Hagdorn 2003, Zweck & Huybrechts 2005), and the Lingle & Clark model. Therefore further efforts to validate different earth models used in ice sheet simulations are, not surprisingly, worthwhile.