Fig. 5
From: Precipitation drives western Patagonian glacier variability and may curb future ice mass loss
Higher precipitation may offset future temperature-induced mass loss from western Patagonian outlet glaciers. Our future simulations indicate plausible ice-volume changes of the HPS19, Penguin, and Europa glaciers in response to varying degrees of 21st century warming, as projected under the SSP1-2.6 (+ 0.8°C), SSP2-4.5 (+ 1.5°C), SSP3-7.0 (+ 2.2°C), and SSP5-8.5 (+ 2.8°C) scenarios, in southern South America by 2081–2100 CE (ref10,37,38), along with precipitation increases between 0 and 60% (ref9). Glacier-volume changes are presented relative to the combined modern volumes of the HPS19, Penguin, and Europa glaciers (308 km3; 100%) as simulated in our default model initialization step (Methods “model initialization”). All temperature and precipitation (∆P) anomalies were enforced to linearly increase from 0% at 2000 CE to 100% at 2100 CE, and remained constant at 100% thereafter. All future simulations started from the end of the 6.0 kyr simulation (Figs. 3 and 4) which represents the year 2000 CE. The yellow dotted line shows the control experiment with constant modern climate forcing, i.e., the 1979–2020 CE mean climatology from the CAMELS-CL dataset22.
