Ice Sheets and Climate

1. The Global Climate System.- 1.1 The global energy balance.- 1.2 The zonal mean state.- 1.3 Zonal asymmetry.- 1.4 The oceans.- 1.5 The seasonal cycle.- 2. How Ice Sheets Affect Climate.- 2.1 Ice sheets and the global energy budget.- 2.2 The temperature - ice - albedo feedback.- 2.3 Albedo feedback and external forcing.- 2.4 Feedback involving the ocean circulation.- 2.5 Effect of ice sheets on the zonal mean climatic state.- 2.6 Planetary waves in the atmosphere.- 3. Modelling of Ice Flow.- 3.1 Some aspects of continuum mechanics.- 3.2 Conservation laws.- 3.3 Application to ice flow.- 3.4 Perfect plasticity.- 3.5 Modelling vertically-integrated ice flow.- 3.6 Steady-state profiles of an ice sheet.- 3.7 Normal stresses.- 3.8 Ice shelves.- 3.9 Equilibrium profiles of an unconfined ice shelf.- 4. Numerical Ice-Sheet Models.- 4.1 A model driven by shearing stresses only.- 4.2 Boundary conditions.- 4.3 Modelling the ice sheet - ice shelf junction.- 4.4 An ice sheet on a sloping bedrock.- 5. The Heat Budget of Ice Sheets.- 5.1 The thermodynamic equation.- 5.2 Some basic solutions.- 5.3 The total heat budget of an ice sheet.- 5.4 An approximate method to calculate the temperature field.- 6. Interaction of Ice Flow and Heat Budget.- 6.1 Temperature dependence of the flow parameter.- 6.2 The basic mechanism of instability.- 6.3 Numerical experiments with a temperature dependent flow law.- 6.4 The effect of basal water.- 6.5 The effect of temperature-dependent flow on the equilibrium profile of a free-floating ice shelf.- 7. Bedrock Adjustment.- 7.1 Introduction.- 7.2 Deflection of the lithosphere.- 7.3 The flow in the asthenosphere.- 7.4 An example.- 8. Basic Response of Ice Sheets to Environmental Conditions.- 8.1 Ice sheets on a bounded continent.- 8.2 A semi-infinite continent and a sloping snow line.- 8.3 Linear perturbations.- 8.4 The effect of orography.- 9. More about Environmental Conditions.- 9.1 Ablation.- 9.2 Accumulation.- 9.3 The zonal mean energy balance.- 9.4 Albedo feedback as a latitude-dependent problem.- 9.5 Including continental ice sheets.- 10. The Glacial Cycles of the Pleistocene.- 10.1 Observational evidence of ice ages.- 10.2 The astronomical theory.- 10.3 Stability of northern hemisphere ice sheets.- 10.4 Simulation of the ice volume record.- 10.5 Further remarks.- 11. The Ice Sheets of Greenland and Antarctica.- 11.1 Short description.- 11.2 Ice shelves and ice streams.- 11.3 Grounding-line migration.- 11.4 A model of the Antarctic Ice Sheet.- 11.5 Surging of ice sheets.- 12. Ice Sheets in the Future.- 12.1 The signal-to-other effects ratio.- 12.2 The carbon dioxide problem.- 12.3 The next ice age.- Epilogue.- References.