The demise of the world's largest piedmont glacier: a probabilistic forecast

Sít' Tlein, located in the St. Elias Range, which straddles Alaska's Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Kluane National Park in the Yukon, is the world's largest piedmont glacier. Sít' Tlein has thinned considerably over 30 years of altimetry, yet its low-elevation piedmont lobe has remained intact in contrast to the glaciers that once filled neighboring Icy and Disenchantment bays. In an effort to forecast changes to Sít' Tlein over decadal to centennial timescales, we take a data-constrained dynamical modeling approach in which we infer the parameters of a higher-order model of ice flow - the bed elevation, basal traction, and surface mass balance - with a diverse but spatiotemporally sparse set of observations including satellite-derived, time-varying velocity fields; radar-derived bed and surface elevation measurements; and in situ and remotely sensed observations of accumulation and ablation. Nonetheless, such data do not uniquely constrain model behavior, so we adopt an approximate Bayesian approach based on the Laplace approximation and facilitated by low-rank parametric representations to quantify uncertainty in the bed, traction, and mass balance fields alongside the induced uncertainty in model-based predictions of glacier change. We find that Sít' Tlein is considerably out of balance with contemporary (and presumably future) climate, and we expect its piedmont lobe to largely disappear over the coming centuries. If warming ceases, and surface mass balance remains at 2023 levels, then by 2073 (2173) we forecast a mass loss (expressed in terms of 95 % credible interval) of 323-444 km3 (546-728 km3). If instead surface mass balance continues to change at the same rate as inferred over the historical period, then we forecast a 2073 (2173) mass loss of 383-505 km3 (740-900 km3). In either case, the resulting retreat and subsequent replacement of glacier ice with a marine embayment or lake will yield a significant modification to the regional landscape and ecosystem.