Heinrich events (HEs) are large scale surges of the Laurentide ice sheet over Hudson Bay and Hudson Strait. Such surges or rapid sliding events appear if the base of an ice sheet reaches the melting point. Therefore, HEs can be only treated with ice-sheet models which account for the evolution of temperature inside the ice.

Here, we propose a model intercomparison using a simplified model setup. The experiments can be done with all appropriate ice-sheet models, e.g., shallow-ice-approximation, higher-order and full-Stokes models.

The research questions can be summarized as follows.

• Are there HEs in the given model, and under which circumstances do they appear?

• How long do the events last and how long is the recurrence time between events? Are the events periodical or quasi-periodical?

• How large are the changes in ice volume, ice thickness, homologous basal temperature and basal temperate area?

• How do the ice-surface elevation, homologous basal temperature, sliding and surface velocity look like at certain time slices before, during and after the events?

The files in the list below explain the complete model setup.

• Description of the HEINO model setup download 307 kbyte

• Integer mask indicating where there is hard-rock, soft-sediment or ocean on the computational domain mask.dat download 7.6 kbyte

• FORTRAN subroutine, which reads the mask file read_mask.f download 0.8 kbyte