Termini of calving glaciers as self-organized critical systems

Calving margins are highly sensitive to changes in climate and glacier terminus geometry. Numerical modelling suggests that calving glacier termini are self-organized critical systems that are fluctuating between states of advance and retreat. Over the next century, one of the largest contributions to sea level rise will come from ice sheets and glaciers calving ice into the ocean1. Factors controlling the rapid and nonlinear variations in calving fluxes are poorly understood, and therefore difficult to include in prognostic climate-forced land-ice models. Here we analyse globally distributed calving data sets from Svalbard, Alaska (USA), Greenland and Antarctica in combination with simulat…