Record-breaking extreme events, including heatwaves leading to surface melt and extreme snowfall, have been observed in Antarctica in recent years. Such extreme events are generally expected to become more frequent and intense with anthropogenic climate change. Here, with a suite of numerical ice-sheet simulations, we explore the additional Antarctic contribution to future sea-level rise when including atmospheric temperature extremes of varying frequency and intensity in projections.

We identify potential oceanic gateways to Antarctic grounding lines based on high-resolution bathymetry data and examine the effect of access depths on ice-shelf melt rates. These gateways manifest the deepest topographic features that could channel warm water masses to the base of the ice sheet. We identify oceanic gateways in several Antarctic regions and estimate an upper bound of melt rate changes in case all warm water masses gain access to the cavities.

The study investigates how changing sea levels around Antarctica can potentially affect the melting of floating ice shelves. It utilizes numerical models for both the Antarctic Ice Sheet and the solid Earth, investigating features like troughs and sills that control the flow of ocean water onto the continental shelf. The research finds that compared to climatic changes, the effect of relative sea level on ice-shelf melting is small.

For future sea-level projections, approximating Antarctic precipitation increases through temperature-scaling approaches will remain important, as coupled ice-sheet simulations with regional climate models remain computationally expensive, especially on multi-centennial timescales. We here revisit the relationship between Antarctic temperature and precipitation using different scaling approaches, identifying and explaining regional differences.

To facilitate the search for funding within Germany and internationally, APECS Germany has started to host a list of grant, fellowship and other funding opportunities at https://apecs-germany.de/funding/. In our article, we present our new website while describing the different stages of the quest to find funding and to highlight best practices for, for example, writing grant proposals.