Parallel numerical modelling of ice flow in Antarctica

The Antarctic Ice Sheet is made up of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) and the much larger East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS). Previous numerical models have focussed on ice flow in WAIS, since the size of the EAIS has precluded studies at a resolution adequate to identify complex flow features. The equations describing ice flow are highly non-linear, making this a computationally intensive problem. We use a staggered grid to overcome numerical instability and a sparse packing scheme to take account of the irregular boundary of Antarctica. We have developed a highly efficient parallel thermally-coupled ice flow model of the entire Antarctic Ice Sheet at a resolution of 20km and present performance results obtained on a commodity cluster of workstations. Our initial results show areas of East Antarctica at pressure melting point that may be characterised by fast ice flow