Abstract. The Northeast Greenland Ice Stream (NEGIS) area has been suffering a significant ice mass loss during the last decades. This is partly due to increasing oceanic temperatures in the subpolar North Atlantic, which enhance submarine basal melting and mass discharge. This demonstrates the high sensitivity of this region to oceanic changes. Alongside, a recent study suggests that the NEGIS grounding line was 20–40 km behind its present-day location for 15 ka during Marine Isotopic Stage (MIS) 3, raising an important conundrum. This retreat has been attributed to a combination of atmospheric and external forcings but a modelling approach to the problem is pending. Here we investigate the sensitivity of the NEGIS to the oceanic forcing during the Last Glacial Period (LGP) using a three-dimensional hybrid ice-sheet-shelf model. We find that a sufficiently high oceanic forcing could account for a NEGIS ice-margin retreat of several tens of km, potentially explaining the recently proposed NEGIS grounding-line retreat during MIS-3.
Correction to: Sedimentary records of Marine Isotopic Stage 3 (MIS 3) in southern Brazil