Why Ice Cliffs Can Stabilize

With rising temperatures, the buttressing ice shelves at the edges the Antarctic ice sheet are melting and calving off at record rates, leaving behind sheer cliffs of solid ice. The stability of these exposed ice cliffs could influence how Antarctica further breaks apart and contributes to sea level rise around the world. 

Scientists have assumed that an ice cliff’s stability depends on its height: Ice cliffs that are taller than 100 meters — about the height of the Statue of Liberty — should collapse under their own weight. And once a cliff sloughs off, it should expose even taller, inland cliffs that collapse in turn. At least, that’s been the idea.

But researchers at MIT and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) have found that the stability of an ice cliff depends on more than its height. And even when a cliff topples, it doesn’t necessarily set off a runaway collapse. 

In a study appearing today in Science, the team presents an analysis of over 15,000 ice cliffs in Antarctica that were monitored by satellites over a four-year period. They observed how the ice cliffs and the larger ice sheet evolved over time, and found that those ice cliffs that collapsed did so at a much faster rate than scientists had predicted. But these collapsing cliffs also quickly stabilized, instead of continuing to erode the larger ice sheet. 

“We found that when the cliffs were retreating, they were doing so faster than what has been modeled, which would mean more ice loss and higher contributions of sea level rise,” says study author Caroline Needell, a graduate student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program. “But because we found that the retreat was short-lived, and all the glaciers eventually stabilized, that would suggest that things won’t be so bad. We don’t see this runaway effect.”

The study’s co-authors are Catherine Walker, assistant scientist at WHOI, and Jeremy Bassis, associate professor at the University of Michigan.

Ice height

In glacial science, ice cliff collapse is described by a process known as marine ice cliff instability (MICI), which assumes that if an ice cliff exceeds a critical height, it will collapse. If then a taller cliff is exposed, it too should collapse, triggering a cascade of instabilities that shrink and erode the ice sheet over time. 

In previous studies, scientists have characterized MICI mainly by modeling the physical properties of ice, scaling these relationships up to the size of an ice cliff and combining these predictions with a few observations of actual ice cliffs in Antarctica. Through these efforts, scientists had determined that ice cliffs become unstable and collapse when they are taller about 100 meters.  

“Predictive ice-sheet models that have been used so far to represent ice cliff instability just take into account cliff height,” Needell notes. “That’s the only variable that matters. And once the cliff height reaches the critical threshold, usually 100 meters, it should initiate this runaway effect of ice sheet retreat.”

But she and her colleagues wondered: How tall do ice cliffs really get? And when they collapse, do they really set off a runaway retreat? 

To answer these questions, they looked to data collected by NASA’s Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2) — a satellite that passes over the Earth’s polar regions and uses a laser altimeter to measure the height of ice sheets, glaciers, sea ice, and the level of the ocean in and around Antarctica. 

The team collected the satellite’s data from 2019 to 2023, which included measurements every three months of over 15,000 ice cliffs. From this dataset, they observed that the average ice cliff was about 30 meters tall — much shorter than the proposed critical height. But they did see a few rare ice cliffs that exceeded 100 meters. 

They also looked for other features that might influence a cliff’s stability. Interestingly, they found that ice cliffs that more or less stayed in place over time also had thicker mélange — a term for the slushy mix of broken icebergs and sea ice that gathers at the front of an ice cliff. 

“We measured mélange height and found taller cliffs have thicker mélange, which could be a built-in stabilizing effect,” Needell explains.

The satellite data also showed that the height of the surrounding water can stabilize a cliff: The deeper the water, the more it can buoy and push back against the cliff, keeping it from collapsing. 

Glacial speed bump

“After we did that global analysis, we thought, ok, let’s zoom in on the tallest cliffs and see how they’re behaving,” Needell says.

The team focused in on four regions around the Antarctic ice sheet where the satellite captured the tallest ice cliffs, each about 100 meters tall, with one that was 127 meters tall. They compiled measurements of these four cliffs and how they evolved every three months, over four years. 

From these measurements, they saw that indeed, the tallest cliffs collapsed, and the ice sheet in those regions retreated, at a surprisingly faster rate than MICI models had predicted. 

“But that retreat was short-lived,” Needell notes. 

After that, the ice spread back out toward the ocean.

“It’s this rapid retreat, punctuated by periods of stabilization,” Needell says. “That was puzzling to us. Then, we thought: We need to look at all the things that affect cliff height.”

The first thing they considered was the topography of the land underneath the ice. If that topography is relatively flat, then the slope of the overlying ice sheet reflects that actual height of the ice itself. But if there’s a bump or rise in the land, the ice sitting directly over that bump is in fact shorter than it appears. The topography then could act as a literal speed bump, thinning the overlying ice, and making it less likely to collapse. 

When the researchers checked topographic measurements of Antarctic, they found that indeed, ice cliffs stabilized around regions where the land happened to rise up. 

They also found that the taller a cliff is, the faster they “thin out” — as they collapse, once tall cliffs settle into shorter, more stable cliffs that prevents further collapse. 

“Now we know what to look for,” Needell says. “We really need to know the bed topography, and we need to know the ice thinning rate, in order to get ice cliff instability right, because this value really matters in the context of projecting sea level rise.” 

This research was supported, in part, by NASA, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the DOMINOS project, a component of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration.