An unprecedentedly complete compilation of observations from Svalbard, Alaska, Greenland, and Antarctica reveal that calving event volumes and inter-event times follow power-law distributions.  Further analytical and numerical analyses reveal that iceberg calving is a self-organized critical process, indicating that calving rates can vary over orders of magnitude in response to only small variations in environmental forcings, such as sea level or air temperature.

The article is available here.

  • Citation: A. Åström, D. Vallot, M. Schäfer, E. Z. Welty, S. O’Neel, T. C. Bartholomaus, Y. Liu, T.I. Riikilä, J. Timonen, T. Zwinger, and J.C. Moore (2014), Termini of calving glaciers as self-organised critical systems, Nature Geoscience, 7, 874-878, doi:10.1038/ngeo2290.
  • Journal website: http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v7/n12/full/ngeo2290.html