Data for: Subglacial freshwater driven speedup of East Antarctic outlet glacier retreat

Recent studies have revealed the presence of a complex freshwater system
underlying the Aurora Subglacial Basin (ASB), a region of East Antarctica
that contains ~7 m of global sea level potential in ice mainly grounded
below sea level. Yet, the impact that subglacial freshwater has on driving
the evolution of the dynamic outlet glaciers that drain this basin has yet
to be tested in a coupled ice sheet-subglacial hydrology numerical
modeling framework. Here, we project the evolution of the primary outlet
glaciers draining the ASB (Moscow University Ice Shelf, Totten,
Vanderford, and Adams Glaciers) in response to an evolving subglacial
hydrology system and to ocean forcing through 2100, following low and high
CMIP6 emission scenarios. By 2100, ice-hydrology feedbacks enhance the
ASB’s 2100 sea level contribution by ~30% (7.50 mm to 9.80 mm) in high
emission scenarios and accelerate retreat of Totten Glacier’s main ice
stream by 25 years. Ice-hydrology feedbacks are particularly influential
in the retreat of the Vanderford and Adams Glaciers, driving an additional
10 km of retreat in fully-coupled simulations relative to uncoupled
simulations. Hydrology-driven ice shelf melt enhancements are the primary
cause of domain-wide mass loss in low emission scenarios, but are
secondary to ice sheet frictional feedbacks under high emission scenarios.
The results presented here demonstrate that ice-subglacial hydrology
interactions can significantly accelerate retreat of dynamic Antarctic
glaciers and that future Antarctic sea level assessments that do not take
these interactions into account might be severely underestimating
Antarctic Ice Sheet mass loss.  In this data publication, we
present the model output and results associated with the following
manuscript recently submitted to the Journal of Geophysical Research:
Earth Surface: “Subglacial discharge accelerates ocean driven retreat of
Aurora Subglacial Basin outlet glaciers over the 21st century”. We include
yearly ice sheet model output between 2017-2100 for eight numerical
ice-subglacial hydrology model runs. We also include the ice sheet and
subglacial hydrology model initial states. In addition, we include all
ocean forcing time-series (temperature and salinity for the low emission
and high emission climate forcing scenarios for three glacial regions),
which are used as input into the melt parameterization. Lastly, we include
a MATLAB script that contains the code used to couple the ice-subglacial
hydrology models as well as a "readme" file with further
information on all data in this publication.