Modelling alpine glacier geometry and subglacial erosion patterns in response to contrasting climatic forcing

International audienceClimate exerts a primary control on glacier mass balance, driving changes in ice flux, which affects basal sliding and subglacial erosion. Although past glacier reconstructions have been widely used as paleo-climate proxies, extracting quantitative temperature/precipitation data from paleo-glaciers is still challenging. The iSOSIA ice model was used over a synthetic landscape to quantitatively investigate the non-linear dependence of glacier geometry and ice dynamics on climate forcing, as well as to analyse how spatial patterns of subglacial erosion and erosion rates vary between the accumulation and ablation zones for different climatic settings. We performed 10 calibrated climatic scenarios with different combinations of temperature and pr