CalTech: Antarctica's Ice Shelves Could be Melting Faster than We Thought. Really!

More alarmism and hysteria based on climate model predictions! This is at best speculative science!

These climate models incomplete and incapable of correctly backcasting! Our knowledge about climate is still very limited! Anyone, who claims otherwise is a pretender!

The actual study only mentions West Antarctica in the title! See also the small area affected on the figure below from the study. The official CalTech press releas even limits the affected are only to the "West Antarctic Peninsula (WAP)".

"... "If this mechanism that we've been studying is active in the real world, it may mean that ice shelf melt rates are 20 to 40 percent higher than the predictions in global climate models, which typically cannot simulate these strong currents near the Antarctic coast,"  ...
The team's model takes into account the narrow Antarctic Coastal Current that runs counterclockwise around the entire Antarctic continent, a current which many climate models do not include because it is so small. ..."

From the abstract:

"The observed acceleration of ice shelf basal melt rates throughout West Antarctica could destabilize continental ice sheets and markedly increase global sea level. Explanations for decadal-scale melt intensification have focused on processes local to shelf seas surrounding the ice shelves. A suite of process-based model experiments, guided by CMIP6 forcing scenarios, show that freshwater forcing from the Antarctic Peninsula, propagated between marginal seas by a coastal boundary current, causes enhanced melting throughout West Antarctica. The freshwater anomaly stratifies the ocean in front of the ice shelves and modifies vertical and lateral heat fluxes, enhancing heat transport into ice shelf cavities and increasing basal melt. Increased glacial runoff at the Antarctic Peninsula, one of the first signatures of a warming climate in Antarctica, emerges as a key trigger for increased ice shelf melt rates in the Amundsen and Bellingshausen Seas."

Antarctica's Ice Shelves Could be Melting Faster than We Thought | www.caltech.edu A new model developed by Caltech and JPL researchers suggests that Antarctica's ice shelves may be melting at an accelerated rate, which could eventually contribute to more rapid sea level rise. The model accounts for an often-overlooked narrow ocean current along the Antarctic coast and simulates how rapidly flowing freshwater, melted from the ice shelves, can trap dense warm ocean water at the base of the ice, causing it to warm and melt even more.

Antarctic Peninsula warming triggers enhanced basal melt rates throughout West Antarctica (open access)