4.4 East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS)
The rate of sea level contribution from the EAIS has a weak negative relationship with global mean surface temperature (2051-2100: -0.1±0.2 mm/yr/K), indicating that increases in accumulation under warmer conditions outweigh any losses from other processes. In fact, as was the case for the WAIS, ice dynamics shows no obvious trend with temperature (Fig. 7) suggesting that the only process relevant during the 21st century, irrespective of SSP, is changes in snowfall. This conclusion is consistent throughout the IPCC assessment reports (Church et al., 2013; Gregory and Huybrechts, 2006) despite numerous advances and developments in process understanding, model resolution and numerics. However, the lack of sensitivity is likely more to do with how the forcing is prescribed and defined than with the fidelity of the ice sheet models. Taking a different approach by assessing the response to sub-shelf melting, a separate modeling study found a significant sea level contribution was obtained for the EAIS with a discernible sensitivity to the forcing scenario (Levermann et al., 2020).