Marine ice sheet model performance depends on basal sliding physics and sub-shelf melting

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Gladstone, Rupert Michael; Warner, Roland Charles; Galton-Fenzi, Benjamin Keith; Gagliardini, Olivier; Zwinger, Thomas; Greve, Ralf

2017-01-01

Computer models are necessary for understanding and predicting marine ice sheet behaviour. However, there is uncertainty over implementation of physical processes at the ice base, both for grounded and floating glacial ice. Here we implement several sliding relations in a marine ice sheet flow-line model accounting for all stress components and demonstrate that model resolution requirements are strongly dependent on both the choice of basal sliding relation and the spatial distribution of ice shelf basal melting.Sliding relations that reduce the magnitude of the step change in basal drag from grounded ice to floating ice (where basal drag is set to zero) show reduced dependence on resolution compared to a commonly used relation, in which basal drag is purely a power law function of basal ice velocity. Sliding relations in which basal drag goes smoothly to zero as the grounding line is approached from inland (due to a physically motivated incorporation of effective pressure at the bed) provide further reduction in resolution dependence.A similar issue is found with the imposition of basal melt under the floating part of the ice shelf: melt parameterisations that reduce the abruptness of change in basal melting from grounded ice (where basal melt is set to zero) to floating ice provide improved convergence with resolution compared to parameterisations in which high melt occurs adjacent to the grounding line.Thus physical processes, such as sub-glacial outflow (which could cause high melt near the grounding line), impact on capability to simulate marine ice sheets. If there exists an abrupt change across the grounding line in either basal drag or basal melting, then high resolution will be required to solve the problem. However, the plausible combination of a physical dependency of basal drag on effective pressure, and the possibility of low ice shelf basal melt rates next to the grounding line, may mean that some marine ice sheet systems can be reliably simulated at a coarser resolution than currently thought necessary.

Hydrogeomorphic processes of thermokarst lakes with grounded-ice and floating-ice regimes on the Arctic coastal plain, Alaska

USGS Publications Warehouse

Arp, C.D.; Jones, Benjamin M.; Urban, F.E.; Grosse, G.

2011-01-01

Thermokarst lakes cover > 20% of the landscape throughout much of the Alaskan Arctic Coastal Plain (ACP) with shallow lakes freezing solid (grounded ice) and deeper lakes maintaining perennial liquid water (floating ice). Thus, lake depth relative to maximum ice thickness (1·5–2·0 m) represents an important threshold that impacts permafrost, aquatic habitat, and potentially geomorphic and hydrologic behaviour. We studied coupled hydrogeomorphic processes of 13 lakes representing a depth gradient across this threshold of maximum ice thickness by analysing remotely sensed, water quality, and climatic data over a 35-year period. Shoreline erosion rates due to permafrost degradation ranged from L) with periods of full and nearly dry basins. Shorter-term (2004–2008) specific conductance data indicated a drying pattern across lakes of all depths consistent with the long-term record for only shallow lakes. Our analysis suggests that grounded-ice lakes are ice-free on average 37 days longer than floating-ice lakes resulting in a longer period of evaporative loss and more frequent negative P − EL. These results suggest divergent hydrogeomorphic responses to a changing Arctic climate depending on the threshold created by water depth relative to maximum ice thickness in ACP lakes.

Icebreaking Concepts.

DTIC Science & Technology

1980-01-01

Development, Report No 731343 Tests of 102 mm dia milling 160-190 1.1-1.3 Bonz, 1973 cutters 6n floating .ce Tesis of chain saw on floating ice 1430 9.9 tlonz... dia (urcular saws 140 (field) 2 3 Lecourt. I . I W Lewis. I Kotras and I C Roth (1973) Mechan- cutting floating ice 290-32) flab) 20-22 ical ire (utter...8217 3 . NUMBER OF PAGES 21 14. MONITORING AGENCY NAME & ADORESS(II different from Controlling Offlce) 1S. SECURITY CLASS. (of this report) Unclassified

Wave excited motion of a body floating on water confined between two semi-infinite ice sheets

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ren, K.; Wu, G. X.; Thomas, G. A.

2016-12-01

The wave excited motion of a body floating on water confined between two semi-infinite ice sheets is investigated. The ice sheet is treated as an elastic thin plate and water is treated as an ideal and incompressible fluid. The linearized velocity potential theory is adopted in the frequency domain and problems are solved by the method of matched eigenfunctions expansion. The fluid domain is divided into sub-regions and in each sub-region the velocity potential is expanded into a series of eigenfunctions satisfying the governing equation and the boundary conditions on horizontal planes including the free surface and ice sheets. Matching is conducted at the interfaces of two neighbouring regions to ensure the continuity of the pressure and velocity, and the unknown coefficients in the expressions are obtained as a result. The behaviour of the added mass and damping coefficients of the floating body with the effect of the ice sheets and the excitation force are analysed. They are found to vary oscillatorily with the wave number, which is different from that for a floating body in the open sea. The motion of the body confined between ice sheets is investigated, in particular its resonant behaviour with extremely large motion found to be possible under certain conditions. Standing waves within the polynya are also observed.

Britle failure of non-Newtonian, floating, extensional flows

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sayag, Roiy; Worster, Michael

2011-11-01

Glacier ice is driven by gravity to flow from the land, where it is under shear, into the ocean, where it floats and extends. Owing to its non-Newtonian rheology, the ice can flow axisymmetrically over the bed but undergo brittle failure once it is floating on the ocean, as observed for example in crevassing of ice shelves. We model this coupled flow as an intrusion of a viscous gravity current into a denser ocean and study it both theoretically and experimentally. We have conducted laboratory experiments using a shear-thinning suspension that represents ice, and a denser inviscid fluid that represents an ocean. The non-Newtonian fluid was released at a constant flux through a cylindrical nozzle over a horizontal plane. The grounded, shear-dominated region of the flow was axisymmetric throughout the experiment, while past the transition line axisymmetry broke down into a seemingly ordered set of finger-like extensions (floating shelves) that demonstrated brittle behaviour. We have found that the width of the fingers as well as their radial extent increase with the flux. We attempt to explain these observations through a fingering instability that is driven by the dynamical differences between the two flow domains and by the material rheology, and we project that analysis to formulate a linkage between the material properties of ice and an upper bound on the width of ice shelves. NERC

Comparison Between Terrestrial Explosion Crater Morphology in Floating Ice and Europan Chaos

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Billings, S. E.; Kattenhorn, S. A.

2003-01-01

Craters created by explosives have been found to serve as valuable analogs to impact craters, within limits. Explosion craters have been created in floating terrestrial ice in experiments related to clearing ice from waterways. Features called chaos occur on the surface of Europa s floating ice shell. Chaos is defined as a region in which the background plains have been disrupted. Common features of chaos include rafted blocks of pre-existing terrain suspended in a matrix of smooth or hummocky material; low surface albedo; and structural control on chaos outline shape by pre-existing lineaments. All published models of chaos formation call on endogenic processes whereby chaos forms through thermal processes. Nonetheless, we note morphological similarities between terrestrial explosion craters and Europan chaos at a range of scales and consider whether some chaos may have formed by impact. We explore these similarities through geologic and morphologic mapping.

Modeling of subaqueous melting in Petermann Fjord, Northwestern Greenland using an ocean general circulation model

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cai, C.; Rignot, E. J.; Xu, Y.; An, L.; Tinto, K. J.; van den Broeke, M. R.

2014-12-01

Basal melting of the floating tongue of Petermann Glacier, in northwestern Greenland is by far the largest process of mass ablation. Melting of the floating tongue is controlled by the buoyancy of the melt water plume, the pressure-dependence of the melting point of sea ice, and the mixing of warm subsurface water with fresh buoyant subglacial discharge. In prior simulations of this melting process, the role of subglacial discharge has been neglected because in similar configurations (floating ice shelves) in the Antarctic, surface runoff is negligible; this is however not true in Greenland. Here, we use the Mass Institute of Technology general circulation model (MITgcm) at a high spatial resolution (10 m x 10 m) to simulate the melting process of the ice shelf in 2-D. The model is constrained by ice shelf bathymetry and ice thickness (refined model in the immediate vicinity of the grounding line) from NASA Operation IceBridge (2011), ocean temperature/salinity data from Johnson et al. (2011), ocean tide height and current from the Arctic Ocean Tidal Inverse Model (AOTIM-5) by Padman and Erofeeva (2004) and subglacial discharge at the grounding line calculated by the hydrostatic potential of the ice from estimated products of the Regional Atmospheric Climate Model (RACMO) of Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI). We compare the results obtained in winter (no runoff) with summer, and the sensitivity of the results to thermal forcing from the ocean, and to the variation of tide height and current, and to the magnitude of subglacial runoff. We conclude on the impact of the ocean and surface melting on the melting regime of the floating ice tongue of Petermann. The basal melt rate increases ~20% with summer surface runoff. This work is performed under a contract with NASA Cryosphere Program.

Seasonal variability in ice-front position, glacier speed, and surface elevation at Helheim Glacier, SE Greenland, from 2010-2016

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kehrl, L. M.; Joughin, I. R.; Shean, D. E.

2016-12-01

Marine-terminating glaciers can be very sensitive to changes in ice-front position, depending on their geometry. If a nearly grounded glacier retreats into deeper water, the glacier typically must speed up to produce the additional longitudinal and lateral stress gradients necessary to restore force balance. This speedup often causes thinning, which can increase the glacier's susceptibility to further retreat. In this study, we combine satellite observations and numerical modeling (Elmer/Ice) to investigate how seasonal changes in ice-front position affect glacier speed and surface elevation at Helheim Glacier, SE Greenland, from 2010-2016. Helheim's calving front position fluctuated about a mean position from 2010-2016. During 2010/11, 2013/14, and 2015/16, Helheim seasonally retreated and advanced along a reverse bed slope by > 3 km. During these years, the glacier retreated from winter/spring to late summer and then readvanced until winter/spring. During the retreat, Helheim sped up by 20-30% and thinned by 20 m near its calving front. This thinning caused the calving front to unground, and a floating ice tongue was then able to readvance over the following winter with limited iceberg calving. The advance, which continued until the glacier reached the top of the bathymetric high, caused the glacier to slow and thicken. During years when Helheim likely did not form a floating ice tongue, iceberg calving continued throughout the winter. Consequently, the formation of this floating ice tongue may have helped stabilize Helheim after periods of rapid retreat and dynamic thinning. Helheim's rapid retreat from 2001-2005 also ended when a floating ice tongue formed and readvanced over the 2005/06 winter. These seasonal retreat/advance cycles may therefore be important for understanding Helheim's long-term behavior.

Getting around Antarctica: New High-Resolution Mappings of the Grounded and Freely-Floating Boundaries of the Antarctic Ice Sheet Created for the International Polar Year

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Bindschadler, R.; Choi, H.; Wichlacz, A.; Bingham, R.; Bohlander, J.; Brunt, K.; Corr, H.; Drews, R.; Fricker, H.; Hall, M.;

Impacts of Recent Warming on a Floating Ice Tongue in Northern Greenland

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cullen, N. J.; Huff, R.; Steffen, K.; Rignot, E.

2004-12-01

The recent collapse of ice shelves in West Antarctica and to the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf, Ellesmere Island, Canada, has been interpreted as evidence of accelerated climate change in the high latitudes. To improve our understanding of the stability of glaciers in northern Greenland a combination of field data, remote sensing observations and modeling is used to investigate both bottom and surface melt processes on the Petermann Gletscher (81 N, 60 W). The Petermann Gletscher is similar to other more well-known ice shelves because it has a large floating section, or ice tongue, that is 20-km wide by 70-km long. This purpose of this work is to describe in detail the surface climate of the Petermann Gletscher from automatic weather station (AWS) data. Emphasis in placed on describing surface energy exchanges that have controlled ablation over the 3 most recent summer seasons (2002-4). Projection of ablation over the entire surface of the ice tongue using a degree-day model shows that surface lowering of the ice tongue in 2002-3 is 50 percent higher than a 53-year proxy melt record established from AWS measurements at nearby Alert, Ellesmere Island. If this warming trend continues the increased thinning rate is likely to yield enhanced calving rates at the ice front of the Petermann Gletscher, which could ultimately weaken and fracture the floating ice tongue.

Improving Altimetry Height-change Retrieval on the Fringes of the Antarctic Ice Sheet

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Paolo, F. S.; Nilsson, J.; Gardner, A. S.

2017-12-01

Projections of sea-level change over the next century are highly uncertain, in part, due to insufficient understanding of ice-sheet sensitivity to changes in oceanic and atmospheric circulation. This limitation is, to a large degree, related to the lack of long and continuous observational records covering critical regions along the ice-sheet margins where the ice interacts with the ocean. Of particular importance are accurate records of changes in ice thickness that provide information on how mass fluctuates on the floating extensions of ice streams and glaciers through which the ice-sheet drains. These changes can modify the stability of the grounded ice sheet through changing back-stress, for example, through loss of ice-shelf buttressing. Here, we synthetize 25+ years of satellite altimetry observations to extend the time span and improve the resolution and accuracy of the existing record of Antarctic floating ice thickness. We incorporate data from ESA's ERS-1, ERS-2, Envisat and Cryosat-2 radar altimeters (1992-present) and NASA's ICESat laser altimeter (2003-2009) and Operation IceBridge surveys (2009-present); with plans to include ICESat-2 data soon after its launch in September 2018. Towards this effort, we revisit some of the main corrections applied to altimeter data, such as minimization of the difference between measurements from radar and laser systems; and we improve the approach for the synthesis of heterogeneous measurements of ice-surface topography and uncertainty estimation. We report on our progress in constructing this long-term and homogeneous record, with a particular focus on the floating ice shelves.

Investigation of Icing Characteristics of Typical Light Airplane Engine Induction Systems

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Coles, W. D.

1949-01-01

The icing characteristics of two typical light-airplane engine induction systems were investigated using the carburetors and manifolds of engines in the horsepower ranges from 65 to 85 and 165 to 185. The smaller system consisted of a float-type carburetor with an unheated manifold and the larger system consisted of a single-barrel pressure-type carburetor with an oil-jacketed manifold. Carburetor-air temperature and humidity limits of visible and serious Icing were determined for various engine power conditions. Several.methods of achieving ice-free induction systems are discussed along with estimates of surface heating requirements of the various induct ion-system components. A study was also made of the icing characteristics of a typical light-airplane air scoop with an exposed filter and a modified system that provided a normal ram inlet with the filter located in a position to Induce inertia separation of the free water from the charge air. The principle of operation of float-type carburetors is proved to make them inherently more susceptible to icing at the throttle plate than pressure-type carburetors.. The results indicated that proper jacketing and heating of all parts exposed to the fuel spray can satisfactorily reduce or eliminate icing in the float-type carburetor and the manifold. Pressure-type carburetors can be protected from serious Icing by proper location of the fuel-discharge nozzle combined with suitable application of heat to critical parts.

The Autumn of break-ups: When Jakobshavn Isbrae lost its floating tongue

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Aschwanden, A.; Fahnestock, M. A.; Truffer, M.; Motyka, R. J.

2015-12-01

Capturing the temporal variability in outlet glacier flow remains one of the holy grails in ice sheet modeling. Here we demonstrate progress using the three-dimensional Parallel Ice Sheet Model. Using a first-order calving law and prescribed subshelf basal melt rates, we performed high-resolution (<1km) hindcasts of the Greenland Ice Sheet of the 1989-2012 period. These hindcasts allow us to study the processes governing ice-shelf thinning, break-up, and subsequent speed-ups and dynamic thinning. Focussing our analysis on the Jakobshavn basin we show that our simulations are able to capture the thinning of the floating tongue resulting from increased subshelf basal melt rates. Furthermore, our simulations capture both the magnitude and the timing of the dynamic thinning associated with the loss of the floating tongue, as well as the speed-up. We find little seasonal variations in surface speeds prior to 1995, and strong variations thereafter, in good agreement with observations of Echelmeyer and Harrison (1991) and Joughin et al (2012).

When ice meets water: Sub-aqueous melt and its relevance in various settings

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Truffer, M.; Motyka, R. J.

2014-12-01

The largest glacier changes are primarily observed in settings where ice flows into a proglacial water body. However, the responses to this interaction are not uniform. Rapidly retreating glaciers can occur in close vicinity to advancing ones. Calving styles and glacier morphologies vary greatly as well. Temperate lake-calving glaciers frequently exhibit floating tongues; but this is rarely observed on temperate tidewater glaciers. Calving styles range from mostly sub-aerial calving to full-thickness calving to slow detachment of large ice bergs. In addition to the more obvious mechanical calving, glaciers lose mass at their termini through sub-aqueous melting. Melt rates of submerged ice have been shown to vary over several orders of magnitudes, and can range up to several meters per day. This large range is a consequence of different proglacial water temperatures, and of different modes of water transport. Water convection in proglacial water bodies can be driven by winds and tides, but subglacial water discharge is commonly the strongest and most variable driver. Here we attempt to relate the variability of forcings and melt rates to the various morphologies and calving styles of different water-terminating glaciers. The highest melt rates are observed at low-latitude tidewater glaciers, where ocean water can be warm (7 - 10 deg C) and subglacial discharge high. In such settings, sub-aqueous melt can reach the same magnitude as ice flux delivered to the terminus and it can control ice terminus position. Polar tidewater glaciers, such as those in Greenland, often exhibit floating tongues. Although melt rates are likely much lower, they can have a large effect under a floating tongue because of the much larger exposure of ice to water. Changes in melt rates can therefore affect the stability of such floating tongues. Low melt rates occur at some ice shelves at high latitudes, where the temperature and freshwater forcings are small. This situation can also occur at temperate lake-calving glaciers, which often flow into lakes of near freezing temperatures. Due to the very small density differences between subglacial discharge and ambient lake water, convection below the floating tongue is minor or non-existent.. This is in great contrast to fresh water entering a saline environment.

Large Fluctuations in Speed on Jakobshavn Isbrae, Greenland

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Joughin, Ian; Abdalati, Waleed; Fahnestock, Mark

2003-01-01

We have assembled an 18-year velocity record for Jakobshavn Isbrae, Greenland. From a 1985 speed of approx. 7000 m/yr, the glacier had slowed by approx. 1000 m/ yr in 1992, which coincided with independently observed thickening in the early 1990s . The glacier then sped up by approx. 4000 m/yr between 1997 and 2000, during which time other measurements show rapid thinning . From 2000 to 2003, the glacier s floating ice tongue almost entirely disintegrated, as speed increased to 12,600 m/yr. If the retreat of the ice tongue caused the acceleration, then similar losses of floating ice tongues since the Little Ice Age may explain the current rapid thinning observed for many of Greenland s outlet glaciers.

Impact of ice-shelf sediment content on the dynamics of plumes under melting ice shelves

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wells, A.

2015-12-01

When a floating ice shelf melts into an underlying warm salty ocean, the resulting fresh meltwater can rise in a buoyant Ice-Shelf-Water plume under the ice. In certain settings, ice flowing across the grounding line carries a basal layer of debris rich ice, entrained via basal freezing around till in the upstream ice sheet. Melting of this debris-laden ice from floating ice shelves provides a flux of dense sediment to the ocean, in addition to the release of fresh buoyant meltwater. This presentation considers the impact of the resulting suspended sediment on the dynamics of ice shelf water plumes, and identifies two key flow regimes depending on the sediment concentration frozen into the basal ice layer. For large sediment concentration, melting of the debris-laden ice shelf generates dense convectively unstable waters that drive convective overturning into the underlying ocean. For lower sediment concentration, the sediment initially remains suspended in a buoyant meltwater plume rising along the underside of the ice shelf, before slowly depositing into the underlying ocean. A theoretical plume model is used to evaluate the significance of the negatively buoyant sediment on circulation strength and the feedbacks on melting rate, along with the expected depositional patterns under the ice shelf.

Observing Physical and Biological Drivers of pH and O2 in a Seasonal Ice Zone in the Ross Sea Using Profiling Float Data

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Briggs, E.; Martz, T. R.; Talley, L. D.; Mazloff, M. R.

2015-12-01

Ice cover has strong influence over gas exchange, vertical stability, and biological production which are critical to understanding the Southern Ocean's central role in oceanic biogeochemical cycling and heat and carbon uptake under a changing climate. However the relative influence of physical versus biological processes in this hard-to-study region is poorly understood due to limited observations. Here we present new findings from a profiling float equipped with biogeochemical sensors in the seasonal ice zone of the Ross Sea capturing, for the first time, under-ice pH profile data over a two year timespan from 2014 to the present. The relative influence of physical (e.g. vertical mixing and air-sea gas exchange) and biological (e.g. production and respiration) drivers of pH and O2 within the mixed layer are explored during the phases of ice formation, ice cover, and ice melt over the two seasonal cycles. During the austral fall just prior to and during ice formation, O2 increases as expected due to surface-layer undersaturation and enhanced gas exchange. A small increase in pH is also observed during this phase, but without a biological signal in accompanying profiling float chlorophyll data, which goes against common reasoning from both a biological and physical standpoint. During the phase of ice cover, gas exchange is inhibited and a clear respiration signal is observed in pH and O2 data from which respiration rates are calculated. In the austral spring, ice melt gives rise to substantial ice edge phytoplankton blooms indicated by O2 supersaturation and corresponding increase in pH and large chlorophyll signal. The influence of the duration of ice cover and mixed layer depth on the magnitude of the ice edge blooms is explored between the two seasonal cycles.

Ice sheet radar altimetry

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Zwally, J.

1988-01-01

The surface topography of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets between 72 degrees north and south was mapped using radar altimetry data from the U.S. Navy GEOSAT. The glaciological objectives of this activity were to study the dynamics of the ice flow, changes in the position of floating ice-shelf fronts, and ultimately to measure temporal changes in ice surface elevation indicative of ice sheet mass balance.

Ice Engineering - study of Related Properties of Floating Sea-Ice Sheets and Summary of Elastic and Viscoelastic Analyses

DTIC Science & Technology

1977-12-01

Ice Plate Example. To demonstrate the capability of the visco- elastic finite-element computer code (5), the structural response of an infinite ... sea -ice plate on a fluid foundation is investigated for a simulated aircraft loading condition and, using relaxation functions, is determined

An Integrative Wave Model for the Marginal Ice Zone Based on a Rheological Parameterization

DTIC Science & Technology

2015-09-30

2015) Characterizing the behavior of gravity wave propagation into a floating or submerged viscous layer , 2015 AGU Joint Assembly Meeting, May 3–7...are the PI and a PhD student. Task 1: Use an analytical method to determine the propagation of waves through a floating viscoelastic mat for a wide...and Ben Holt. 2 Task 3: Assemble all existing laboratory and field data of wave propagation in ice covers. Task 4: Determine if all existing

Ice-Cliff Failure via Retrogressive Slumping

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Parizek, B. R.; Christianson, K.; Alley, R. B.; Voytenko, D.; Vankova, I.; Dixon, T. H.; Holland, D.

2016-12-01

The magnitude and rate of future sea-level rise from warming-induced ice-sheet shrinkage remain notably uncertain. Removal of most of an ice sheet by surface melting alone requires centuries to millennia. Oceanic warming may accelerate loss by removing buttressing ice shelves and thereby speeding flow of non-floating ice into the ocean, but, until recently, modeled timescales for major dynamic ice-sheet shrinkage were centuries or longer. Beyond certain thresholds, however, observations show that warming removes floating ice shelves, leaving grounded ice cliffs from which icebergs break off directly. Cliffs higher than some limit experience rapid structural failure. Recent parameterization of this process in a comprehensive ice-flow model produced much faster sea-level rise from future rapid warming than in previous modeling studies, through formation and retreat of tall ice cliffs. Fully physical representations of this process are not yet available, however. Here, we use modeling guided by terrestrial radar data from Helheim Glacier, Greenland to show that cliffs will fail by slumping and trigger rapid retreat at a threshold height that, in crevassed ice with surface melting, may be only slightly above the 100-m maximum observed today, but may be roughly twice that (180-275 m) in mechanically-competent ice under well-drained or low-melt conditions.

Arctic ice shelves and ice islands: Origin, growth and disintegration, physical characteristics, structural-stratigraphic variability, and dynamics

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Jeffries, M.O.

1992-08-01

Ice shelves are thick, floating ice masses most often associated with Antarctica where they are seaward extensions of the grounded Antarctic ice sheet and sources of many icebergs. However, there are also ice shelves in the Arctic, primarily located along the north coast of Ellesmere Island in the Canadian High Arctic. The only ice shelves in North America and the most extensive in the north polar region, the Ellesmere ice shelves originate from glaciers and from sea ice and are the source of ice islands, the tabular icebergs of the Arctic Ocean. The present state of knowledge and understanding ofmore » these ice features is summarized in this paper. It includes historical background to the discovery and early study of ice shelves and ice islands, including the use of ice islands as floating laboratories for polar geophysical research. Growth mechanisms and age, the former extent and the twentieth century disintegration of the Ellesmere ice shelves, and the processes and mechanisms of ice island calving are summarized. Surface features, thickness, thermal regime, and the size, shape, and numbers of ice islands are discussed. The structural-stratigraphic variability of ice islands and ice shelves and the complex nature of their growth and development are described. Large-scale and small-scale dynamics of ice islands are described, and the results of modeling their drift and recurrence intervals are presented. The conclusion identifies some unanswered questions and future research opportunities and needs. 97 refs., 18 figs.« less

Observations of upper ocean stability and heat fluxes in the Antarctic from under-ice Argo float profile data.

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wilson, E. A.; Riser, S.

2016-12-01

Sea ice growth around Antarctica is intimately linked to the stability and thermohaline structure of the underlying ocean. As sea ice grows, the resulting brine triggers convective instabilities that deepen the mixed layer and entrain warm water from the weakly stratified pycnocline. The heat released from this process acts as a strong negative feedback to ice growth which, under the right scenarios, can exceed the initial atmospheric heat loss. Much of our current understanding of this ice-ocean interaction comes from a handful of relatively short field campaigns in the Weddell Sea. Here, we supplement those observations with an analysis of over 9000 under-ice Argo float profiles, collected between 2006-2015. These profiles provide an unprecedented view of the temporal and spatial variability of the upper ocean structure throughout the Antarctic region. With these observations and a theoretical understanding of the coupled ice-ocean system, we assess the ocean's potential to limit thermodynamic ice growth as well as its susceptibility to deep convection in different regions. Using these results, we infer how recent climatic changes may influence Antarctic sea ice growth and deep ocean ventilation in the near future.

Backscatter from ice growing on shallow tundra lakes near Barrow, Alaska, winter 1991-1992

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Jeffries, M. O.; Wakabayashi, H.; Weeks, W. F.; Morris, K.

1993-01-01

The timing of freeze-up and break-up of Arctic lake ice is a potentially useful environmental indicator that could be monitored using SAR. In order to do this, it is important to understand how the properties and structure of the ice during its growth and decay affect radar backscatter and thus lake ice SAR signatures. The availability of radiometrically and geometrically calibrated digital SAR data time series from the Alaska SAR Facility has made it possible for the first time to quantify lake ice backscatter intensity (sigma(sup o)) variations. This has been done for ice growing on shallow tundra lakes near Barrow, NW Alaska, from initial growth in September 1991 until thawing and decay in June 1992. Field and laboratory observations and measurements of the lake ice were made in late April 1992. The field investigations of the coastal lakes near Barrow confirmed previous findings that, (1) ice frozen to the lake bottom had a dark signature in SAR images, indicating weak backscatter, while, (2) ice that was floating had a bright signature, indicating strong backscatter. At all sites, regardless of whether the ice was grounded or floating, there was a layer of clear, inclusion-free ice overlaying a layer of ice with dense concentrations of vertically oriented tubular bubbles. At some sites, there was a third layer of porous, snow-ice overlaying the clear ice.

Gravity anomaly at a Pleistocene lake bed in NW Alaska interpreted by analogy with Greenland's Lake Taserssauq and its floating ice tongue

USGS Publications Warehouse

Barnes, D.F.

1987-01-01

A possible example of a very deep glacial excavation is provided by a distinctive gravity low located at the front of a valley glacier that once flowed into glacial Lake Aniuk (formerly Lake Noatak) in the western Brooks Range. Geologic and geophysical data suggest that sediments or ice filling a glacially excavated valley are the most probable cause of the 30-50 mGal anomaly. Reasonable choices of geometric models and density contrasts indicate that the former excavation is now filled with a buried-ice thickness of 700 m or sediment thicknesses greater than 1 km. No direct evidence of efficient excavation was observed in Greenland, but efficient glacial erosion behind a floating polar ice tongue could explain the excavation that caused the Alaskan gravity anomaly. -from Author

Skylab floating ice experiment

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Campbell, W. J. (Principal Investigator); Ramseier, R. O.; Weaver, R. J.; Weeks, W. F.

1975-01-01

The author has identified the following significant results. Coupling of the aircraft data with the ground truth observations proved to be highly successful with interesting results being obtained with IR and SLAR passive microwave techniques, and standard photography. Of particular interest were the results of the PMIS system which operated at 10.69 GHz with both vertical and horizontal polarizations. This was the first time that dual polarized images were obtained from floating ice. In both sea and lake ice, it was possible to distinguish a wide variety of thin ice types because of their large differences in brightness temperatures. It was found that the higher brightness temperature was invariably obtained in the vertically polarized mode, and as the age of the ice increases the brightness temperature increases in both polarizations. Associated with this change in age, the difference in temperature was observed as the different polarizations decreased. It appears that the horizontally polarized data is the most sensitive to variations in ice type for both fresh water and sea ice. The study also showed the great amount of information on ice surface roughness and deformation patterns that can be obtained from X-band SLAR observations.

Object-Based Image Classification of Floating Ice Used as Habitat for Harbor Seals in a Tidewater Glacier Fjord in Alaska

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

McNabb, R. W.; Womble, J. N.; Prakash, A.; Gens, R.; Ver Hoef, J.

2014-12-01

Tidewater glaciers play an important role in many landscape and ecosystem processes in fjords, terminating in the sea and calving icebergs and discharging meltwater directly into the ocean. Tidewater glaciers provide floating ice for use as habitat for harbor seals (Phoca vitulina richardii) for resting, pupping, nursing, molting, and avoiding predators. Tidewater glaciers are found in high concentrations in Southeast and Southcentral Alaska; currently, many of these glaciers are retreating or have stabilized in a retracted state, raising questions about the future availability of ice in these fjords as habitat for seals. Our primary objective is to investigate the relationship between harbor seal distribution and ice availability at an advancing tidewater glacier in Johns Hopkins Inlet, Glacier Bay National Park, Alaska. To this end, we use a combination of visible and infrared aerial photographs, object-based image analysis (OBIA), and statistical modeling techniques. We have developed a workflow to automate the processing of the imagery and the classification of the fjordscape (e.g., individual icebergs, brash ice, and open water), providing quantitative information on ice coverage as well as properties not typically found in traditional pixel-based classification techniques, such as block angularity and seal density across the fjord. Reflectance variation in the red channel of the optical images has proven to be the most important first-level criterion to separate open water from floating ice. This first-level criterion works well in areas without dense brash ice, but tends to misclassify dense brash ice as single icebergs. Isolating these large misclassified regions and applying a higher reflectance threshold as a second-level criterion helps to isolate individual ice blocks surrounded by dense brash ice. We present classification results from surveys taken during June and August, 2007-2013, as well as preliminary results from statistical modeling of the spatio-temporal distribution of seals and ice. OBIA is a powerful method of habitat classification and offers an effective approach to compare the spatio-temporal distribution and availability of glacial ice habitats for harbor seals in tidewater glacial fjords.

Rapid thinning and collapse of lake calving Yakutat Glacier, Southeast Alaska

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Trussel, Barbara Lea

Glaciers around the globe are experiencing a notable retreat and thinning, triggered by atmospheric warming. Tidewater glaciers in particular have received much attention, because they have been recognized to contribute substantially to global sea level rise. However, lake calving glaciers in Alaska show increasingly high thinning and retreat rates and are therefore contributors to sea level rise. The number of such lake calving systems is increasing worldwide as land-terminating glaciers retreat into overdeepened basins and form proglacial lakes. Yakutat Glacier in Southeast Alaska is a low elevation lake calving glacier with an accumulation to total area ratio of 0.03. It experienced rapid thinning of 4.43 +/- 0.06 m w.e. yr-1 between 2000-2010 and terminus retreat of over 15 km since the beginning of the 20th century. Simultaneously, adjacent Yakutat Icefield land-terminating glaciers thinned at lower but still substantial rates (3.54 +/- 0.06 m w.e. yr -1 for the same time period), indicating lake calving dynamics help drive increased mass loss. Yakutat Glacier sustained a ˜3 km long floating tongue for over a decade, which started to disintegrate into large tabular icebergs in 2010. Such floating tongues are rarely seen on temperate tidewater glaciers. The floating ice was weakened by surface ablation, which then allowed rifts to form and intersect. Ice velocity from GPS measurements showed that the ice on the floating tongue was moving substantially faster than grounded ice, which was attributed to rift opening between the floating and grounded ice. Temporal variations of rift opening were determined from time-lapse imagery, and correlated well with variations in ice speeds. Larger rift opening rates occurred during and after precipitation or increased melt episodes. Both of these events increased subglacial discharge and could potentially increase the subaqueous currents towards the open lake and thus increase drag on the ice underside. Simultaneously, increased water input may cause lake level in rifts to rise resulting in faster rift propagation and spreading. Similar formation and disintegration of floating tongues are expected to occur in the glacier's future, as the ice divide lies below the current lake level. In addition to calving retreat, Yakutat Glacier is rapidly thinning, which lowers its surface and therefore exposes the ice to warmer air temperatures causing increased thinning. Even under a constant climate, this positive feedback mechanism would force Yakutat Glacier to quickly retreat and mostly disappear. Simulations of future mass loss were run for two scenarios, keeping the current climate and forcing it with a projected warming climate. Results showed that over 95% of the glacier ice will have disappeared by 2120 or 2070 under a constant vs projected climate, respectively. For the first few decades, the glacier will be able to maintain its current thinning rate by retreating and thus losing areas of lowest elevation. However, once higher elevations have thinned substantially, the glacier cannot compensate any more to maintain a constant thinning rate and transfers into an unstable run-away situation. To stop this collapse and transform Yakutat Glacier into equilibrium in its current geometry, air temperatures would have to drop by 1.5 K or precipitation would have to increase by more than 50%. An increase in precipitation alone is unlikely to lead to a stable configuration, due to the very small current accumulation area.

Impact of Basal Hydrology Near Grounding Lines: Results from the MISMIP-3D and MISMIP+ Experiments Using the Community Ice Sheet Model

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Leguy, G.; Lipscomb, W. H.; Asay-Davis, X.

2017-12-01

Ice sheets and ice shelves are linked by the transition zone, the region where the grounded ice lifts off the bedrock and begins to float. Adequate resolution of the transition zone is necessary for numerically accurate ice sheet-ice shelf simulations. In previous work we have shown that by using a simple parameterization of the basal hydrology, a smoother transition in basal water pressure between floating and grounded ice improves the numerical accuracy of a one-dimensional vertically integrated fixed-grid model. We used a set of experiments based on the Marine Ice Sheet Model Intercomparison Project (MISMIP) to show that reliable grounding-line dynamics at resolutions 1 km is achievable. In this presentation we use the Community Ice Sheet Model (CISM) to demonstrate how the representation of basal lubrication impacts three-dimensional models using the MISMIP-3D and MISMIP+ experiments. To this end we will compare three different Stokes approximations: the Shallow Shelf Approximation (SSA), a depth-integrated higher-order approximation, and the Blatter-Pattyn model. The results from our one-dimensional model carry over to the 3-D models; a resolution of 1 km (and in some cases 2 km) remains sufficient to accurately simulate grounding-line dynamics.

An integrated approach to the remote sensing of floating ice

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Campbell, W. J.; Ramseier, R. O.; Weeks, W. F.; Gloersen, P.

1976-01-01

Review article on remote sensing applications to glaciology. Ice parameters sensed include: ice cover vs open water, ice thickness, distribution and morphology of ice formations, vertical resolution of ice thickness, ice salinity (percolation and drainage of brine; flushing of ice body with fresh water), first-year ice and multiyear ice, ice growth rate and surface heat flux, divergence of ice packs, snow cover masking ice, behavior of ice shelves, icebergs, lake ice and river ice; time changes. Sensing techniques discussed include: satellite photographic surveys, thermal IR, passive and active microwave studies, microwave radiometry, microwave scatterometry, side-looking radar, and synthetic aperture radar. Remote sensing of large aquatic mammals and operational ice forecasting are also discussed.

NASA Spacecraft Images One of Earth Iceberg Incubators

NASA Image and Video Library

2012-04-13

Acquired by NASA Terra spacecraft, this image shows the west coast of Greenland, one of Earth premiere incubators for icebergs -- large blocks of land ice that break off from glaciers or ice shelves and float in the ocean.

Sea ice off western Alaska

NASA Image and Video Library

2015-02-20

On February 4, 2014 the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) flying aboard NASA’s Aqua satellite captured a true-color image of sea ice off of western Alaska. In this true-color image, the snow and ice covered land appears bright white while the floating sea ice appears a duller grayish-white. Snow over the land is drier, and reflects more light back to the instrument, accounting for the very bright color. Ice overlying oceans contains more water, and increasing water decreases reflectivity of ice, resulting in duller colors. Thinner ice is also duller. The ocean waters are tinted with green, likely due to a combination of sediment and phytoplankton. Alaska lies to the east in this image, and Russia to the west. The Bering Strait, covered with ice, lies between to two. South of the Bering Strait, the waters are known as the Bering Sea. To the north lies the Chukchi Sea. The bright white island south of the Bering Strait is St. Lawrence Island. Home to just over 1200 people, the windswept island belongs to the United States, but sits closer to Russia than to Alaska. To the southeast of the island a dark area, loosely covered with floating sea ice, marks a persistent polynya – an area of open water surrounded by more frozen sea ice. Due to the prevailing winds, which blow the sea ice away from the coast in this location, the area rarely completely freezes. The ice-covered areas in this image, as well as the Beaufort Sea, to the north, are critical areas for the survival of the ringed seal, a threatened species. The seals use the sea ice, including ice caves, to rear their young, and use the free-floating sea ice for molting, raising the young and breeding. In December 2014, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) proposed that much of this region be set aside as critical, protected habitat for the ringed seal. Credit: NASA/GSFC/Jeff Schmaltz/MODIS Land Rapid Response Team NASA image use policy. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA’s mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA’s accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific knowledge to advance the Agency’s mission. Follow us on Twitter Like us on Facebook Find us on Instagram

36 CFR 327.30 - Shoreline Management on Civil Works Projects.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2012 CFR

2012-07-01

... Development Areas for ski jumps, floats, boat moorage facilities, duck blinds, and other private floating recreation facilities when they will not create a safety hazard and inhibit public use or enjoyment of project waters or shoreline. A Corps permit is not required for temporary ice fishing shelters or duck...

36 CFR 327.30 - Shoreline Management on Civil Works Projects.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2014 CFR

2014-07-01

... Development Areas for ski jumps, floats, boat moorage facilities, duck blinds, and other private floating recreation facilities when they will not create a safety hazard and inhibit public use or enjoyment of project waters or shoreline. A Corps permit is not required for temporary ice fishing shelters or duck...

Finger rafting: a generic instability of floating elastic sheets.

PubMed

Vella, Dominic; Wettlaufer, J S

2007-02-23

Colliding ice floes are often observed to form a series of interlocking fingers. We show that this striking phenomenon is not a result of some peculiar property of ice but rather a general and robust mechanical phenomenon reproducible in the laboratory with other floating materials. We determine the theoretical relationship between the width of the resulting fingers and the material's mechanical properties and present experimental results along with field observations to support the theory. The generality of this "finger rafting" suggests that analogous processes may be responsible for creating the large-scale structures observed at the boundaries between Earth's convergent tectonic plates.

Victoria Land, Ross Sea, and Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

2002-01-01

On December 19, 2001, MODIS acquired data that produced this image of Antarctica's Victoria Land, Ross Ice Shelf, and the Ross Sea. The coastline that runs up and down along the left side of the image denotes where Victoria Land (left) meets the Ross Ice Shelf (right). The Ross Ice Shelf is the world's largest floating body of ice, approximately the same size as France. Credit: Jacques Descloitres, MODIS Land Rapid Response Team, NASA/GSFC

SOCCOM Biogeochemical Profiling Floats: Representativeness and Deployment Strategies Utilizing GO-SHIP/Argo Observations and SOSE/Hycom Model Output

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Talley, L. D.; Riser, S.; Johnson, K. S.; Wang, J.; Kamenkovich, I. V.; Rosso, I.; Mazloff, M. R.; Ogle, S.; Sarmiento, J. L.

2016-12-01

Biogeochemical profiling floats are being deployed in the Southern Ocean south of 30°S, including within the seasonal sea ice zone, as part of the SOCCOM project. The floats carry oxygen, nitrate, pH, fluorescence and backscatter sensors, in addition to standard T/S measurements that contribute to the Argo program. The total array size over the expected 6 years of deployment will be 180 to 200 floats. At the conclusion of Year 2 (2015-2016), 58 floats had been deployed and 50 were still active (see figure from http://soccom.princeton.edu). In order to calibrate the biogeochemical sensors using shipboard measurements, deployment takes place from research ships. As the ship tracks are dictated by other programs, care is taken prior to deployment to maximize the probability that the floats sample varied oceanographic regimes, and that all important regimes present along a deployment track are seeded with at least one float. Prior GO-SHIP hydrographic sections are used to locate water mass regimes that are targeted for deployments, yielding a background description of the oceanography along each of these sections. Simulations of Argo floats in the Southern Ocean State Estimate (SOSE) and data-assimilating HYCOM model and previous Argo trajectories are used to predict ensemble float trajectories. Trajectories and water mass regimes from floats after deployment have generally agreed well with those projected prior to deployment. The exercise of examining this suite of information prior to the deployment cruises provides valuable regional information for interpreting the actual SOCCOM float profiles and trajectories. Particularly useful are demarcation of the major frontal regimes and their relation to sea ice and topography, regions of upwelling from the deep ocean to the surface, and upper ocean mode water regions associated with both the Subantarctic and Polar Fronts.

Ocean Tide Influences on the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Padman, Laurie; Siegfried, Matthew R.; Fricker, Helen A.

2018-03-01

Ocean tides are the main source of high-frequency variability in the vertical and horizontal motion of ice sheets near their marine margins. Floating ice shelves, which occupy about three quarters of the perimeter of Antarctica and the termini of four outlet glaciers in northern Greenland, rise and fall in synchrony with the ocean tide. Lateral motion of floating and grounded portions of ice sheets near their marine margins can also include a tidal component. These tide-induced signals provide insight into the processes by which the oceans can affect ice sheet mass balance and dynamics. In this review, we summarize in situ and satellite-based measurements of the tidal response of ice shelves and grounded ice, and spatial variability of ocean tide heights and currents around the ice sheets. We review sensitivity of tide heights and currents as ocean geometry responds to variations in sea level, ice shelf thickness, and ice sheet mass and extent. We then describe coupled ice-ocean models and analytical glacier models that quantify the effect of ocean tides on lower-frequency ice sheet mass loss and motion. We suggest new observations and model developments to improve the representation of tides in coupled models that are used to predict future ice sheet mass loss and the associated contribution to sea level change. The most critical need is for new data to improve maps of bathymetry, ice shelf draft, spatial variability of the drag coefficient at the ice-ocean interface, and higher-resolution models with improved representation of tidal energy sinks.

Adaptation of an unstructured-mesh, finite-element ocean model to the simulation of ocean circulation beneath ice shelves

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Kimura, Satoshi; Candy, Adam S.; Holland, Paul R.; Piggott, Matthew D.; Jenkins, Adrian

2013-07-01

Several different classes of ocean model are capable of representing floating glacial ice shelves. We describe the incorporation of ice shelves into Fluidity-ICOM, a nonhydrostatic finite-element ocean model with the capacity to utilize meshes that are unstructured and adaptive in three dimensions. This geometric flexibility offers several advantages over previous approaches. The model represents melting and freezing on all ice-shelf surfaces including vertical faces, treats the ice shelf topography as continuous rather than stepped, and does not require any smoothing of the ice topography or any of the additional parameterisations of the ocean mixed layer used in isopycnal or z-coordinate models. The model can also represent a water column that decreases to zero thickness at the 'grounding line', where the floating ice shelf is joined to its tributary ice streams. The model is applied to idealised ice-shelf geometries in order to demonstrate these capabilities. In these simple experiments, arbitrarily coarsening the mesh outside the ice-shelf cavity has little effect on the ice-shelf melt rate, while the mesh resolution within the cavity is found to be highly influential. Smoothing the vertical ice front results in faster flow along the smoothed ice front, allowing greater exchange with the ocean than in simulations with a realistic ice front. A vanishing water-column thickness at the grounding line has little effect in the simulations studied. We also investigate the response of ice shelf basal melting to variations in deep water temperature in the presence of salt stratification.

Satellite-derived submarine melt rates and mass balance (2011-2015) for Greenland's largest remaining ice tongues

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Wilson, Nat; Straneo, Fiammetta; Heimbach, Patrick

2017-12-01

Ice-shelf-like floating extensions at the termini of Greenland glaciers are undergoing rapid changes with potential implications for the stability of upstream glaciers and the ice sheet as a whole. While submarine melting is recognized as a major contributor to mass loss, the spatial distribution of submarine melting and its contribution to the total mass balance of these floating extensions is incompletely known and understood. Here, we use high-resolution WorldView satellite imagery collected between 2011 and 2015 to infer the magnitude and spatial variability of melt rates under Greenland's largest remaining ice tongues - Nioghalvfjerdsbræ (79 North Glacier, 79N), Ryder Glacier (RG), and Petermann Glacier (PG). Submarine melt rates under the ice tongues vary considerably, exceeding 50 m a-1 near the grounding zone and decaying rapidly downstream. Channels, likely originating from upstream subglacial channels, give rise to large melt variations across the ice tongues. We compare the total melt rates to the influx of ice to the ice tongue to assess their contribution to the current mass balance. At Petermann Glacier and Ryder Glacier, we find that the combined submarine and aerial melt approximately balances the ice flux from the grounded ice sheet. At Nioghalvfjerdsbræ the total melt flux (14.2 ± 0.96 km3 a-1 w.e., water equivalent) exceeds the inflow of ice (10.2 ± 0.59 km3 a-1 w.e.), indicating present thinning of the ice tongue.

JPRS Report, East Europe.

DTIC Science & Technology

1988-06-07

barriers have been abolished, the franchising terms have been revised, a floating rate and increasingly realistic rate of exchange—though in my opinion...also be accorded permits for the establishment of private ice cream stands and ice cream parlors, snack and beer providers, fish stands, bakeries

36 CFR § 327.30 - Shoreline Management on Civil Works Projects.

Code of Federal Regulations, 2013 CFR

2013-07-01

... Development Areas for ski jumps, floats, boat moorage facilities, duck blinds, and other private floating recreation facilities when they will not create a safety hazard and inhibit public use or enjoyment of project waters or shoreline. A Corps permit is not required for temporary ice fishing shelters or duck...

A 70-year record of outlet glacier retreat in northern Greenland

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hill, Emily; Carr, Rachel; Stokes, Chris; Gudmundsson, Hilmar

2017-04-01

Over the past two decades, the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) has undergone accelerated mass loss increasing its contribution to sea level rise. This is partly attributed to increased mass loss from dynamic marine-terminating outlet glaciers. Despite marine-terminating outlet glaciers in northern Greenland draining 40% of the ice sheet by area, they are comparatively less well-studied than other regions of the ice sheet (e.g. central west or south-east). This region could be susceptible to marine-ice sheet instability due to large proportions of the bedrock rested below sea level and is also unique in the presence of large floating ice tongues. Here, we use a range of satellite imagery sources, accompanied by historical maps, to examine multi-decadal front position changes at 21 outlet glaciers in northern Greenland between 1948 and 2016. We accompany these terminus changes, with annual records of ice velocity, climate-ocean forcing data, and glacier-specific factors (e.g. fjord-width and basal topography) to understand the dominant forcing on glacier dynamics in the region. Over the last 70 years, there has been a clear pattern of glacier retreat in northern Greenland. This is particularly notable during the last two decades, where 62% of our study glaciers showed accelerated retreat. This was most notable at Humboldt, Tracy, Hagen Brae, C. H. Ostenfeld and Petermann Glaciers, and in the case of the latter three glaciers, this involved substantial retreat of their floating ice tongues (> 10 km). Alongside retreat, several study glaciers underwent simultaneous velocity increases. However, the collapse of floating ice tongues did not always result in increased velocity. Similar to other regions of the ice sheet, recent glacier retreat in the northern regions of the Greenland Ice Sheet could be linked to climatic-oceanic forcing, but at this stage this remains largely unknown. This response to external forcing is further complicated by the presence of glacier-surging recorded at several of our study glaciers. As northern Greenland is predicted to undergo greater warming due to Arctic amplification during the 21st century, we conclude that the region could become an increasingly important source of mass loss.

Exploding Water Drops

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Reich, Gary

2016-01-01

Water has the unusual property that it expands on freezing, so that ice has a specific gravity of 0.92 compared to 1.0 for liquid water. The most familiar demonstration of this property is ice cubes floating in a glass of water. A more dramatic demonstration is the ice bomb shown in Fig. 1. Here a cast iron flask is filled with water and tightly…

Ocean observations from below Petermann Gletscher

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Muenchow, A.; Nicholls, K. W.; Heuzé, C.; Wahlin, A.; Mix, A. C.

2015-12-01

Petermann Gletscher drains 4% of the Greenland ice sheet via a floating ice shelf that has shrunk from 1,300 to 900 km^2 in area via two calving events in 2010 and 2012. The glacier is thinning by about 10 vertical meters per year when integrated over 45 km from the grounding zone to the terminus. Most of this mass loss is caused by ocean melting, but only a single vertical ocean profile taken in 2002 exists. The fjord was mostly free of sea ice in August when we visited in 2003, 2006, 2007, 2009, and 2012 and noticed a small warming trend of bottom waters. During a 2-day survey of Petermann Fjord and adjacent Nares Strait in 2012 we documented a large intrusion of warmer Atlantic waters spilling over the 400 m deep sill and sinking to more than 800 m depth. These waters fill the deep basin of the fjord and move towards the grounding zone of glacier at 550 m below the sea surface. In August 2015 the Swedish icebreaker I/B Oden is scheduled to enter Nares Strait and Petermann Fjord to support field work on land, on water, and on the floating glacier. We here report preliminary results from both ocean surveys and ice shelf moorings. The moored observations from under the ice shelf extend synoptic survey data from Oden. The ice shelf moorings are designed to resolve tidal to interannual variations of water properties under the floating glacier. More specifically, we plan to install a total 13 discrete sensors to measure ocean temperature, salinity, and pressure at five locations distributed both along and across the floating glacier. Hot water drilling provides the holes through the 200 to 500 m thick glacier ice to collect sediment cores, take a profile of temperature and salinity, and deploy two to five cabled sensors per mooring. If successful, data from these cabled instruments will be distributed via surface Iridium connections and posted on the web in near real time. We will discuss successes and failures of this ambitious and high risk program that was facilitated by a bottom-up collaboration of British, Swedish, and US investigators and their respective funding agencies all working on very short and tense schedules. Figure: Sketch of mooring placement on a map (left panel) with 2014 flight tracks and glacier profiles (right panel) obtained from laser altimeter data along the tracks.

Ice shelf thickness change from 2010 to 2017

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Hogg, A.; Shepherd, A.; Gilbert, L.; Muir, A. S.

2017-12-01

Floating ice shelves fringe 74 % of Antarctica's coastline, providing a direct link between the ice sheet and the surrounding oceans. Over the last 25 years, ice shelves have retreated, thinned, and collapsed catastrophically. While change in the mass of floating ice shelves has only a modest steric impact on the rate of sea-level rise, their loss can affect the mass balance of the grounded ice-sheet by influencing the rate of ice flow inland, due to the buttressing effect. Here we use CryoSat-2 altimetry data to map the detailed pattern of ice shelf thickness change in Antarctica. We exploit the dense spatial sampling and repeat coverage provided by the CryoSat-2 synthetic aperture radar interferometric mode (SARIn) to investigate data acquired between 2010 to the present day. We find that ice shelf thinning rates can exhibit large fluctuations over short time periods, and that the improved spatial resolution of CryoSat-2 enables us to resolve the spatial pattern of thinning with ever greater detail in Antarctica. In the Amundsen Sea, ice shelves at the terminus of the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers have thinned at rates in excess of 5 meters per year for more than two decades. We observe the highest rates of basal melting near to the ice sheet grounding line, reinforcing the importance of high resolution datasets. On the Antarctic Peninsula, in contrast to the 3.8 m per decade of thinning observed since 1992, we measure an increase in the surface elevation of the Larsen-C Ice-Shelf during the CryoSat-2 period.

On the scalability of the Albany/FELIX first-order Stokes approximation ice sheet solver for large-scale simulations of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets

DOE PAGES

Tezaur, Irina K.; Tuminaro, Raymond S.; Perego, Mauro; ...

2015-01-01

We examine the scalability of the recently developed Albany/FELIX finite-element based code for the first-order Stokes momentum balance equations for ice flow. We focus our analysis on the performance of two possible preconditioners for the iterative solution of the sparse linear systems that arise from the discretization of the governing equations: (1) a preconditioner based on the incomplete LU (ILU) factorization, and (2) a recently-developed algebraic multigrid (AMG) preconditioner, constructed using the idea of semi-coarsening. A strong scalability study on a realistic, high resolution Greenland ice sheet problem reveals that, for a given number of processor cores, the AMG preconditionermore » results in faster linear solve times but the ILU preconditioner exhibits better scalability. In addition, a weak scalability study is performed on a realistic, moderate resolution Antarctic ice sheet problem, a substantial fraction of which contains floating ice shelves, making it fundamentally different from the Greenland ice sheet problem. We show that as the problem size increases, the performance of the ILU preconditioner deteriorates whereas the AMG preconditioner maintains scalability. This is because the linear systems are extremely ill-conditioned in the presence of floating ice shelves, and the ill-conditioning has a greater negative effect on the ILU preconditioner than on the AMG preconditioner.« less

Rapid bottom melting widespread near Antarctic ice sheet grounding lines

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Rignot, E.; Jacobs, S.

2002-01-01

As continental ice from Antartica reaches the grounding line and begins to float, its underside melts into the ocean. Results obtained with satellite radar interferometry reveal that bottom melt rates experienced by large outlet glaciers near their grounding lines are far higher than generally assumed.

Acoustic Communications and Navigation for Mobile Under-Ice Sensors

DTIC Science & Technology

2017-02-04

From- To) 04/02/2017 Final Report 4. TITLE AND SUBTITLE 5a. CONTRACT NUMBER Acoustic Communications and Navigation for Mobile Under-Ice Sensors...development and fielding of a new acoustic communications and navigation system for use on autonomous platforms (gliders and profiling floats) under the...contact below the ice. 15. SUBJECT TERMS Arctic Ocean, Undersea Workstations & Vehicles, Signal Processing, Navigation, Underwater Acoustics 16

Post-LGM grounding line and calving front translations of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet in the Whales Deep paleo-ice-stream trough, eastern Ross Sea, Antarctica

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

McGlannan, A. J.; Bart, P. J.; Chow, J.

2016-12-01

A large-area (2500 km2) multibeam survey of the Whales Deep paleo-ice-stream trough, eastern Ross Sea, Antarctica was acquired during NBP1502B. This sector of the continental shelf is important as it was covered by grounded and floating ice, which drained the central part of an expanded West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) during the last glacial cycle. The seafloor geomorphology shows a well-defined cluster of four back stepping grounding zone wedges (GZWs) that were deposited in a partly overlapping fashion on the middle continental shelf during WAIS retreat. These observations permit two end-member possibilities for how the WAIS grounding line and calving front vacated the trough. In the first scenario, each GZW represents successive landward shifts of the grounding line and calving front. In the second scenario, each GZW represents a large-scale retreat and re-advance of grounded and floating ice. To determine which of these two end-member scenarios most accurately describes WAIS retreat from this sector of Ross Sea, we evaluated a grid of kasten and piston cores. The core stations were selected on the basis of backstepping GZWs along the trough axis. Our core data analyses included an integration of visual core descriptions, x-ray images, grain size, water content, total organic carbon, shear strengths, and diatom assemblage data. Core data reveal a single transgressive succession from proximal diamict overlain by sub-ice-shelf and/or open-marine sediments. These data strongly support the first scenario, suggesting that an ice shelf remained continuously intact during the time that the grounding line successively moved from the shelf edge to the middle shelf by small-scale landward translations until the end of the fourth grounding event. Sedimentologic and diatom-assemblage data from the inner shelf show that only the last middle shelf grounding event ended with a long-distance retreat of grounded and then floating ice to south of the modern calving front.

Melting beneath Greenland outlet glaciers and ice streams

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Alexander, David; Perrette, Mahé; Beckmann, Johanna

2015-04-01

Basal melting of fast-flowing Greenland outlet glaciers and ice streams due to frictional heating at the ice-bed interface contributes significantly to total glacier mass balance and subglacial meltwater flux, yet modelling this basal melt process in Greenland has received minimal research attention. A one-dimensional dynamic ice-flow model is calibrated to the present day longitudinal profiles of 10 major Greenland outlet glaciers and ice streams (including the Jakobshavn Isbrae, Petermann Glacier and Helheim Glacier) and is validated against published ice flow and surface elevation measurements. Along each longitudinal profile, basal melt is calculated as a function of ice flow velocity and basal shear stress. The basal shear stress is dependent on the effective pressure (difference between ice overburden pressure and water pressure), basal roughness and a sliding parametrization. Model output indicates that where outlet glaciers and ice streams terminate into the ocean with either a small floating ice tongue or no floating tongue whatsoever, the proportion of basal melt to total melt (surface, basal and submarine melt) is 5-10% (e.g. Jakobshavn Isbrae; Daugaard-Jensen Glacier). This proportion is, however, negligible where larger ice tongues lose mass mostly by submarine melt (~1%; e.g. Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden Glacier). Modelled basal melt is highest immediately upvalley of the grounding line, with contributions typically up to 20-40% of the total melt for slippery beds and up to 30-70% for resistant beds. Additionally, modelled grounding line and calving front migration inland for all outlet glaciers and ice streams of hundreds of metres to several kilometres occurs. Including basal melt due to frictional heating in outlet glacier and ice stream models is important for more accurately modelling mass balance and subglacial meltwater flux, and therefore, more accurately modelling outlet glacier and ice stream dynamics and responses to future climate change.

Airborne gravity measurement over sea-ice: The western Weddel Sea

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Brozena, J.; Peters, M.; LaBrecque, J.

1990-10-01

An airborne gravity study of the western Weddel Sea, east of the Antarctic Peninsula, has shown that floating pack-ice provides a useful radar altimetric reference surface for altitude and vertical acceleration corrections surface for alititude and vertical acceleration corrections to airborne gravimetry. Airborne gravimetry provides an important alternative to satellite altimetry for the sea-ice covered regions of the world since satellite alimeters are not designed or intended to provide accurate geoidal heights in areas where significant sea-ice is present within the radar footprint. Errors in radar corrected airborne gravimetry are primarily sensitive to the variations in the second derivative ofmore » the sea-ice reference surface in the frequency pass-band of interest. With the exception of imbedded icebergs the second derivative of the pack-ice surface closely approximates that of the mean sea-level surface at wavelengths > 10-20 km. With the airborne method the percentage of ice coverage, the mixture of first and multi-year ice and the existence of leads and pressure ridges prove to be unimportant in determining gravity anomalies at scales of geophysical and geodetic interest, provided that the ice is floating and not grounded. In the Weddell study an analysis of 85 crosstrack miss-ties distributed over 25 data tracks yields an rms error of 2.2 mGals. Significant structural anomalies including the continental shelf and offsets and lineations interpreted as fracture zones recording the early spreading directions within the Weddell Sea are observed in the gravity map.« less

Thurston Island Calving

NASA Image and Video Library

2014-11-10

A sea of icebergs float near the Thurston Island calving front off of western Antarctica as seen on the IceBridge flight on Nov. 5, 2014. Image Credit: NASA/Jim Yungel NASA’s Operation IceBridge collected some rare images on a flight out of Punta Arenas, Chile on Nov. 5, 2014, on a science flight over western Antarctica dubbed Ferrigno-Alison-Abbott 01. The crew snapped a few shots of a calving front of the Antarctic ice sheet. This particular flight plan was designed to collect data on changes in ice elevation along the coast near the Ferrigno and Alison ice streams, on the Abbot Ice Shelf, and grounded ice along the Eights Coast.

On ice rifts and the stability of non-Newtonian extensional flows on a sphere

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sayag, Roiy

2017-11-01

Rifts that form at the fronts of floating ice shelves that spread into the ocean can trigger major calving events in the ice. The deformation of ice can be modeled as a thin viscous film driven by buoyancy. The front of such a viscous film that propagates over a flat surface with no-slip basal conditions is known to have stable axisymmetric solutions. In contrast, when the fluid propagates under free-slip conditions at the substrate, the front can become unstable to small perturbations if the fluid is sufficiently strain-rate softening. Consequently, the front will develop tongues with a characteristic wavelength that coarsens over time, a pattern that is reminiscent of ice rifts. Here we investigate the stability of a spherical sheet of power-law fluids under free-slip basal conditions. The fluid is discharged at constant flux and axisymmetrically with respect to the pole, and propagates towards the equator. The propagating front in such a situation may become unstable due to its failure to sustain large extensional forces, resulting in the formation of rifts. This study has implications to understanding the cause of patterns that are observed on shells of floating ice in a range of planetary objects, and whether open rifts that sustain life were feasible in snowball earth. Israel Science Foundation 1368/16.

Does It Sink or Float?

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

McDonald, Judith Richards

2012-01-01

This activity is designed to teach prekindergarten to second grade students about the concept of sink or float through an inquiry activity. Students will use familiar objects to predict and test the properties of sink and float. Background information is offered to teachers to assist them with this activity. This lesson begins with an engaging…

Calving Geometry of Thwaites Glacier Linked to Semi-brittle Ice Dynamics

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Logan, L. C.; Lavier, L.; Choi, E.; Tan, E.; Catania, G. A.; Holt, J.

2016-12-01

In the coming decades the linkage between ice dynamics, basal melt, and calving will play a central role in the flow of Thwaites Glacier, which has undergone vast and recent retreat. We explore this connection using a 3D, transient, thermomechanical ice flow model under different basal melt scenarios. Our use of a semi-brittle ice rheology enables the time-dependent development and tracking of surface and basal crevasses that determine the calving rate at this location. With the use of adaptive re-meshing, we are able to simulate the glacier's retreat response to different boundary forcings. We show that the resulting characteristic pinch-and-swell model geometries in the floating tongue compare well with airborne radar data acquired across the grounding line and floating tongue of Thwaites Glacier. These geometric features may be reproduced using this semi-brittle rheology, and further, are linked directly to the calving rate of Thwaites Glacier (and others). The use of semi-brittle rheology on decadal time scales may help provide constraints on the near-term future behavior of glaciers vulnerable to ocean-induced retreat, as this rheology targets the complex interaction of ice failure, basal melt, and flow.

The Petermann Glacier Experiment, NW Greenland

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Mix, A. C.; Jakobsson, M.; Andrews, J. T.; Jennings, A. E.; Mayer, L. A.; Marcott, S. A.; Muenchow, A.; Stoner, J. S.; Andresen, C. S.; Nicholls, K. W.; Anderson, S. T.; Brook, E.; Ceperley, E. G.; Cheseby, M.; Clark, J.; Dalerum, F.; Dyke, L. M.; Einarsson, D.; Eriksson, B.; Frojd, C.; Glueder, A.; Hedman, U.; Heirman, K.; Heuzé, C.; Hogan, K.; Holden, R.; Holm, C.; Jerram, K.; Krutzfeldt, J.; Nicolas, L.; Par, L.; Lomac-MacNair, K.; Madlener, S.; McKay, J. L.; Meijer, T.; Meiton, A.; Brian, M.; Mohammed, R.; Molin, M.; Moser, C.; Normark, E.; Padman, J.; Pecnerova, P.; Reilly, B.; Reusche, M.; Ross, A.; Stranne, C.; Trinhammer, P.; Walczak, M. H.; Walczak, P.; Washam, P.; Karasti, M.; Anker, P.

2016-12-01

The Petermann Glacier Experiment is a comprehensive study on land, ocean, and ice in Northwest Greenland, staged from Swedish Icebreaker Oden in 2015 as a collaboration between the US, Sweden, UK, and Denmark. This talk introduces the strategic goals of the experiment and connects the various scientific results. Petermann Glacier drains a significant marine-based sector of the northern Greenland Ice Sheet and terminates in a floating ice tongue, one of the largest remaining systems of its kind in the northern hemisphere. Records of the modern state of Petermann Glacier and its past variations are of interest to understand the sensitivity of marine terminating outlet glaciers to change, and to constrain the rates and extent of changes that have actually occurred. With this case study we are learning the rules of large scale dynamics that cannot be understood from modern observations alone. Although past behavior is not an simple analog for the future, and no single system captures all possible behaviors, insights from these case studies can be applied through models to better project how similar systems may change in the future. The Petermann Expedition developed the first comprehensive bathymetric maps of the region, drilled through the floating ice tongue to obtain sub-shelf sediment cores near the grounding line and to monitor sub-ice conditions, recovered a broad array of sediment cores documenting changing oceanic conditions in Petermann Fjord, Hall Basin, and Nares Strait, measured watercolumn properties to trace subsurface watermasses that bring heat from the Arctic Ocean into deep Petermann Fjord to melt the base of the floating ice tongue, developed a detailed record of relative sealevel change on land to constrain past ice loads, and recovered pristine boulders for cosmogenic exposure dating of areal ice retreat on land. Together, these studies are shedding new light on the dynamics of past glaciation in Northwest Greenland, and contributing to fundamental understanding of large marine-terminating outlet glacier systems, which are threatened by global warming and poised to contribute to global sealevel rise in the future. Further information in the Petermann Glacier Experiment is available at https://petermannsglacialhistory.wordpress.com

Theory Building and Modeling in a Sinking and Floating Unit: A Case Study of Third and Fourth Grade Students' Developing Epistemologies of Science

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kawasaki, Keiko; Rupert Herrenkohl, Leslie; Yeary, Sherry

2004-01-01

The purpose of this paper is to carefully examine the evolution of students' theory building and modeling, critical components of scientific epistemologies, over a unit of study on sinking and floating in one third/fourth grade classroom. The study described in this paper follows in the tradition of Design Experiments ( Brown 1992 , Collins 1990 )…

Characteristics and processing of seismic data collected on thick, floating ice: Results from the Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica

USGS Publications Warehouse

Beaudoin, Bruce C.; ten Brink, Uri S.; Stern, Tim A.

1992-01-01

Coincident reflection and refraction data, collected in the austral summer of 1988/89 by Stanford University and the Geophysical Division of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, New Zealand, imaged the crust beneath the Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica. The Ross Ice Shelf is a unique acquisition environment for seismic reflection profiling because of its thick, floating ice cover. The ice shelf velocity structure is multilayered with a high velocity‐gradient firn layer constituting the upper 50 to 100 m. This near surface firn layer influences the data character by amplifying and frequency modulating the incoming wavefield. In addition, the ice‐water column introduces pervasive, high energy seafloor, intra‐ice, and intra‐water multiples that have moveout velocities similar to the expected subseafloor primary velocities. Successful removal of these high energy multiples relies on predictive deconvolution, inverse velocity stack filtering, and frequency filtering. Removal of the multiples reveals a faulted, sedimentary wedge which is truncated at or near the seafloor. Beneath this wedge the reflection character is diffractive to a two‐way traveltime of ∼7.2 s. At this time, a prominent reflection is evident on the southeast end of the reflection profile. This reflection is interpreted as Moho indicating that the crust is ∼21-km thick beneath the profile. These results provide seismic evidence that the extensional features observed in the Ross Sea region of the Ross Embayment extend beneath the Ross Ice Shelf.

Earth Observation taken by the Expedition 20 crew

NASA Image and Video Library

2009-09-06

ISS020-E-039083 (6 Sept. 2009) --- Glacier outlet in the Southern Patagonian Ice Field of Chile is featured in this image photographed by an Expedition 20 crew member on the International Space Station. The Southern Patagonian Ice Field of Chile and Argentina hosts a spectacular array of glaciers and associated glacial features within the southern Andes Mountains. Glaciers flowing downhill on the eastern side of the mountains have outlets into several large freshwater lakes. On the western side of the mountains, glaciers release ice into the Pacific Ocean via an intricate network of fjords. Fjords are steep valleys originally cut by glaciers during periods of lower sea level that are now inundated. As glaciers flow into the fjord, ice at the front of the glacier begins to break off and form icebergs that can float out to sea ? a process known as calving. This detailed photograph shows the merged outlet of Penguin Glacier and HPS 19 into a fjord carved into the snow-covered mountains of the southern Andes. The designation HPS stands for Hielo Patagonico Sur (e.g. Southern Patagonian Ice field) and is used to identify glaciers that have no other geographic name. Ice flowing into the fjord begins to break up at center, forming numerous icebergs ? the largest visible in this image is approximately 2 kilometers in width. The large ice masses visible at center have a coarse granular appearance due to variable snow cover, and mixing and refreezing of ice fragments prior to floating free.

Ice-sheet response to oceanic forcing.

PubMed

Joughin, Ian; Alley, Richard B; Holland, David M

2012-11-30

The ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are losing ice at accelerating rates, much of which is a response to oceanic forcing, especially of the floating ice shelves. Recent observations establish a clear correspondence between the increased delivery of oceanic heat to the ice-sheet margin and increased ice loss. In Antarctica, most of these processes are reasonably well understood but have not been rigorously quantified. In Greenland, an understanding of the processes by which warmer ocean temperatures drive the observed retreat remains elusive. Experiments designed to identify the relevant processes are confounded by the logistical difficulties of instrumenting ice-choked fjords with actively calving glaciers. For both ice sheets, multiple challenges remain before the fully coupled ice-ocean-atmosphere models needed for rigorous sea-level projection are available.

Sub-ice-shelf sediments record history of twentieth-century retreat of Pine Island Glacier [Sub-ice shelf sediments record 20 th century retreat history of Pine Island Glacier

DOE PAGES

Smith, J. A.; Andersen, T. J.; Shortt, M.; ...

2016-11-23

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is one of the largest potential sources of rising sea levels. Over the past 40 years, glaciers flowing into the Amundsen Sea sector of the ice sheet have thinned at an accelerating rate, and several numerical models suggest that unstable and irreversible retreat of the grounding line—which marks the boundary between grounded ice and floating ice shelf—is underway. Understanding this recent retreat requires a detailed knowledge of grounding-line history, but the locations of the grounding line before the advent of satellite monitoring in the 1990s are poorly dated. In particular, a history of grounding-line retreatmore » is required to understand the relative roles of contemporaneous ocean-forced change and of ongoing glacier response to an earlier perturbation in driving ice-sheet loss. Here we show that the present thinning and retreat of Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica is part of a climatically forced trend that was triggered in the 1940s. Our conclusions arise from analysis of sediment cores recovered beneath the floating Pine Island Glacier ice shelf, and constrain the date at which the grounding line retreated from a prominent seafloor ridge. We find that incursion of marine water beyond the crest of this ridge, forming an ocean cavity beneath the ice shelf, occurred in 1945 (±12 years); final ungrounding of the ice shelf from the ridge occurred in 1970 (±4 years). The initial opening of this ocean cavity followed a period of strong warming of West Antarctica, associated with El Niño activity. Furthermore our results suggest that, even when climate forcing weakened, ice-sheet retreat continued.« less

Sub-ice-shelf sediments record history of twentieth-century retreat of Pine Island Glacier [Sub-ice shelf sediments record 20 th century retreat history of Pine Island Glacier

DOE Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI.GOV)

Smith, J. A.; Andersen, T. J.; Shortt, M.

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is one of the largest potential sources of rising sea levels. Over the past 40 years, glaciers flowing into the Amundsen Sea sector of the ice sheet have thinned at an accelerating rate, and several numerical models suggest that unstable and irreversible retreat of the grounding line—which marks the boundary between grounded ice and floating ice shelf—is underway. Understanding this recent retreat requires a detailed knowledge of grounding-line history, but the locations of the grounding line before the advent of satellite monitoring in the 1990s are poorly dated. In particular, a history of grounding-line retreatmore » is required to understand the relative roles of contemporaneous ocean-forced change and of ongoing glacier response to an earlier perturbation in driving ice-sheet loss. Here we show that the present thinning and retreat of Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica is part of a climatically forced trend that was triggered in the 1940s. Our conclusions arise from analysis of sediment cores recovered beneath the floating Pine Island Glacier ice shelf, and constrain the date at which the grounding line retreated from a prominent seafloor ridge. We find that incursion of marine water beyond the crest of this ridge, forming an ocean cavity beneath the ice shelf, occurred in 1945 (±12 years); final ungrounding of the ice shelf from the ridge occurred in 1970 (±4 years). The initial opening of this ocean cavity followed a period of strong warming of West Antarctica, associated with El Niño activity. Furthermore our results suggest that, even when climate forcing weakened, ice-sheet retreat continued.« less

Evolution of ocean-induced ice melt beneath Zachariæ Isstrøm, Northeast Greenland combining observations and an ocean general circulation model from 1978 to present

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Cai, C.; Rignot, E. J.; Menemenlis, D.; Millan, R.; Bjørk, A. A.; Khan, S. A.; Charolais, A.

2017-12-01

Zachariæ Isstrøm, a major ice stream in northeast Greenland, lost a large fraction of its ice shelf during the last decade. We study the evolution of subaqueous melting of its floating section from 1978 to present. The ice shelf melt rate depends on thermal forcing from warm, salty, subsurface ocean waters of Atlantic origin (AW), the mixing of AW with fresh, buoyant subglacial discharge at the calving margin, and the shape of the sub-ice-shelf cavity. Subglacial discharge doubled as a result of enhanced ice sheet runoff caused by warmer air temperatures. Ocean thermal forcing has increased due to enhanced advection of AW. Using an Eulerian method, MEaSUREs ice velocity, Operation IceBridge (OIB) ice thickness, and RACMO2.3 surface balance data, we evaluate the ice shelf melt rate in 1978, 1999 and 2010. The melt rate doubled from 1999 to 2010. Using a Lagrangian method with World View imagery, we map the melt rate in detail from 2011 to 2016. We compare the results with 2D simulations from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology general circulation model (MITgcm), at a high spatial resolution (20-m horizontal and 40-m vertical grid spacing), using OIB ice thickness and sub-ice-shelf cavity for years 1978, 1996, 2010 and 2011, combined with in-situ ocean temperature/salinity data from Ocean Melting Greenland (OMG) 2017. We find that winter melt rates are 2 3 times smaller than summer rates and melt rates increase by one order magnitude during the transition from ice shelf termination to near-vertical calving wall termination. As the last remaining bits of floating ice shelf disappear, ice-ocean interaction will therefore play an increasing role in driving the glacier retreat into its marine-based basin. This work was performed under a contract with NASA Cryosphere Program at UC Irvine and Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Theory Building and Modeling in a Sinking and Floating Unit: A Case Study of Third and Fourth Grade Students' Developing Epistemologies of Science. Research Report

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Kawasaki, Keiko; Herrenkohl, Leslie Rupert; Yeary, Sherry A.

2004-01-01

The purpose of this paper is to carefully examine the evolution of students' theory building and modeling, critical components of scientific epistemologies, over a unit of study on sinking and floating in one third/fourth grade classroom. The study described in this paper follows in the tradition of Design Experiments (Brown 1992, Collins 1990)…

Ice911: Developing an Effective Response to Climate Change in Earth's Cryosphere using High Albedo Materials

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Field, L. A.; Wadhams, P.; Root, T.; Chetty, S.; Kammen, D. M.; Venkatesh, S.; van der Heide, D.; Baum, E.

2012-12-01

We are developing a localized surface albedo modification technique which shows promise for preserving ice and snow using inexpensive and environmentally benign floating materials. The approach has been developed with aims including preservation of polar and glacial ice, snow, permafrost and polar habitat,and keeping water cooler, using a localized and ecologically respectful "planetary band-aid" that can be deployed quickly and can be removed once it is no longer needed. The method has been tested at small scale using various material sets over several years, including four Winter/Spring seasons at sites including California's San Francisco Bay Area and Sierra Nevada Mountains, and a Canadian lake. The materials can passively float and in granular form can be easily deployed as a "monolayer" and/or corralled in the desired locations. They have been shown to reduce solar heat absorption in the underlying water in small test pools by nearly 200 Watts/m2 in California summer daytime conditions, and 2 to 11 degree-C reductions in water temperatures have been logged over the course of a day. The materials have a cost of roughly of $11.15/kW-hour (of reflected solar energy that would otherwise have heated the underlying water) for one day. Over a two-month summer period, the materials cost would be roughly eighteen cents/kW-hour of reflected solar energy, and work is ongoing to reduce costs further. Material deployments in a sheet form were used on a California mountain lake in Winter/Spring 2010-2011 to successfully demonstrate over a larger scale that properly engineered materials are effective in aiding snow and ice retention. Over the course of several days during the melting season, we typically observed differences of 70 cm greater snow retention under a Teslin sheet compared to the uncovered control areas. However, sheets tend to act as sails, requiring special measures to remain stable. The most recent season's experimentation saw further evolution in the material and deployment approach. Small deployments were once again made on a California mountain lake, using granular biodegradable food-grade materials or glass-based materials placed in large-mesh containers. The deployments successfully shielded underlying snow and ice from melting, and remained stable in the face of the strong winds in the area. It may also be possible to select materials that are readily incorporated in new ice as it forms in the winter season. Young, or thin, ice tends to have a relatively low albedo, and the higher albedo of ice so formed with these materials incorporated could be advantageous in retaining young or thin ice. We speculate that once a critical amount of ice (or snow, permafrost, etc.) is preserved, the balance may be tipped back sufficiently to slow the overall melting rate of the cryosphere, and further intervention may not be required. Localized albedo modification options such as the one being studied in this work may act to preserve ice, glaciers, permafrost and seasonal snow areas, and perhaps aid natural ice formation processes, enhance the preservation of threatened species, ensure more predictable availability of drinking water, and perhaps bring about a reduction in the Ice-Albedo Feedback Effect, thus slowing some of the effects of climate change in the earth's icy regions and beyond.

Sub-ice-shelf sediments record history of twentieth-century retreat of Pine Island Glacier.

PubMed

Smith, J A; Andersen, T J; Shortt, M; Gaffney, A M; Truffer, M; Stanton, T P; Bindschadler, R; Dutrieux, P; Jenkins, A; Hillenbrand, C-D; Ehrmann, W; Corr, H F J; Farley, N; Crowhurst, S; Vaughan, D G

2017-01-05

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is one of the largest potential sources of rising sea levels. Over the past 40 years, glaciers flowing into the Amundsen Sea sector of the ice sheet have thinned at an accelerating rate, and several numerical models suggest that unstable and irreversible retreat of the grounding line-which marks the boundary between grounded ice and floating ice shelf-is underway. Understanding this recent retreat requires a detailed knowledge of grounding-line history, but the locations of the grounding line before the advent of satellite monitoring in the 1990s are poorly dated. In particular, a history of grounding-line retreat is required to understand the relative roles of contemporaneous ocean-forced change and of ongoing glacier response to an earlier perturbation in driving ice-sheet loss. Here we show that the present thinning and retreat of Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica is part of a climatically forced trend that was triggered in the 1940s. Our conclusions arise from analysis of sediment cores recovered beneath the floating Pine Island Glacier ice shelf, and constrain the date at which the grounding line retreated from a prominent seafloor ridge. We find that incursion of marine water beyond the crest of this ridge, forming an ocean cavity beneath the ice shelf, occurred in 1945 (±12 years); final ungrounding of the ice shelf from the ridge occurred in 1970 (±4 years). The initial opening of this ocean cavity followed a period of strong warming of West Antarctica, associated with El Niño activity. Thus our results suggest that, even when climate forcing weakened, ice-sheet retreat continued.

RTopo-2: A global high-resolution dataset of ice sheet topography, ice shelf cavity geometry and ocean bathymetry

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Timmermann, Ralph; Schaffer, Janin

2016-04-01

The RTopo-1 data set of Antarctic ice sheet/shelf geometry and global ocean bathymetry has proven useful not only for modelling studies of ice-ocean interaction in the southern hemisphere. Following the spirit of this data set, we introduce a new product (RTopo-2) that contains consistent maps of global ocean bathymetry, upper and lower ice surface topographies for Greenland and Antarctica, and global surface height on a spherical grid with now 30 arc seconds resolution. We used the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO_2014) as the backbone and added the International Bathymetric Chart of the Arctic Ocean version 3 (IBCAOv3) and the International Bathymetric Chart of the Southern Ocean (IBCSO) version 1. To achieve a good representation of the fjord and shelf bathymetry around the Greenland continent, we corrected data from earlier gridded products in the areas of Petermann Glacier, Hagen Bræ and Helheim Glacier assuming that sub-ice and fjord bathymetries roughly follow plausible Last Glacial Maximum ice flow patterns. For the continental shelf off northeast Greenland and the floating ice tongue of Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden Glacier at about 79°N, we incorporated a high-resolution digital bathymetry model including all available multibeam survey data for the region. Radar data for ice surface and ice base topographies of the floating ice tongues of Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden Glacier and Zachariæ Isstrøm have been obtained from the data centers of Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Operation Icebridge (NASA/NSF) and Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI). For the Antarctic ice sheet/ice shelves, RTopo-2 largely relies on the Bedmap-2 product but applies corrections for the geometry of Getz, Abbot and Fimbul ice shelf cavities. The data set is available in full and in regional subsets in NetCDF format from the PANGAEA database.

Tidal Flexure, Ice Velocities, and Ablation Rates of Peterman Gletscher, Greenland

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Rignot, Eric

1996-01-01

Over the floating section of a tide-water glacier, single radar intererograms are difficult to use because the long-term steady motion of the ice is intermixed with the tidal vertical motion of the glacier. With multiple interferograms, it is however possible to isolate the tidal signal and remove it from the single interferograms to estimate the ice velocities. The technique is applied to ERS-1 synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images of Petermann Gletscher, north Greenland.

South Greenland, North Atlantic Ocean

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

1992-01-01

This spectacular north looking view of south Greenland (62.0N, 46.0W) shows numerous indentations along the coastline, many of which contain small settlements. These indentations are fiords carved by glaciers of the last ice age. Even today, ice in the center of Greenland is as much as 10,000 ft. thick and great rivers of ice continuously flow toward the sea, where they melt or break off as icebergs - some of which may be seen floating offshore.

South Greenland, North Atlantic Ocean

NASA Image and Video Library

1992-04-02

This spectacular north looking view of south Greenland (62.0N, 46.0W) shows numerous indentations along the coastline, many of which contain small settlements. These indentations are fiords carved by glaciers of the last ice age. Even today, ice in the center of Greenland is as much as 10,000 ft. thick and great rivers of ice continuously flow toward the sea, where they melt or break off as icebergs - some of which may be seen floating offshore.

Sliding Rocks on Racetrack Playa, Death Valley National Park: First Observation of Rocks in Motion

PubMed Central

Lorenz, Ralph D.; Ray, Jib; Jackson, Brian

2014-01-01

The engraved trails of rocks on the nearly flat, dry mud surface of Racetrack Playa, Death Valley National Park, have excited speculation about the movement mechanism since the 1940s. Rock movement has been variously attributed to high winds, liquid water, ice, or ice flotation, but has not been previously observed in action. We recorded the first direct scientific observation of rock movements using GPS-instrumented rocks and photography, in conjunction with a weather station and time-lapse cameras. The largest observed rock movement involved >60 rocks on December 20, 2013 and some instrumented rocks moved up to 224 m between December 2013 and January 2014 in multiple move events. In contrast with previous hypotheses of powerful winds or thick ice floating rocks off the playa surface, the process of rock movement that we have observed occurs when the thin, 3 to 6 mm, “windowpane” ice sheet covering the playa pool begins to melt in late morning sun and breaks up under light winds of ∼4–5 m/s. Floating ice panels 10 s of meters in size push multiple rocks at low speeds of 2–5 m/min. along trajectories determined by the direction and velocity of the wind as well as that of the water flowing under the ice. PMID:25162535

Oxygen in the Southern Ocean From Argo Floats: Determination of Processes Driving Air-Sea Fluxes

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Bushinsky, Seth M.; Gray, Alison R.; Johnson, Kenneth S.; Sarmiento, Jorge L.

2017-11-01

The Southern Ocean is of outsized significance to the global oxygen and carbon cycles with relatively poor measurement coverage due to harsh winters and seasonal ice cover. In this study, we use recent advances in the parameterization of air-sea oxygen fluxes to analyze 9 years of oxygen data from a recalibrated Argo oxygen data set and from air-calibrated oxygen floats deployed as part of the Southern Ocean Carbon and Climate Observations and Modeling (SOCCOM) project. From this combined data set of 150 floats, we find a total Southern Ocean oxygen sink of -183 ± 80 Tmol yr-1 (positive to the atmosphere), greater than prior estimates. The uptake occurs primarily in the Polar-Frontal Antarctic Zone (PAZ, -94 ± 30 Tmol O2 yr-1) and Seasonal Ice Zone (SIZ, -111 ± 9.3 Tmol O2 yr-1). This flux is driven by wintertime ventilation, with a large portion of the flux in the SIZ passing through regions with fractional sea ice. The Subtropical Zone (STZ) is seasonally driven by thermal fluxes and exhibits a net outgassing of 47 ± 29 Tmol O2 yr-1 that is likely driven by biological production. The Subantarctic Zone (SAZ) uptake is -25 ± 12 Tmol O2 yr-1. Total oxygen fluxes were separated into a thermal and nonthermal component. The nonthermal flux is correlated with net primary production and mixed layer depth in the STZ, SAZ, and PAZ, but not in the SIZ where seasonal sea ice slows the air-sea gas flux response to the entrainment of deep, low-oxygen waters.

Rheology of the Ronne Ice Shelf, Antarctica, Inferred from Satellite Radar Interferometry Data using an Inverse Control Method

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Larour, E.; Rignot, E.; Joughin, I.; Aubry, D.

2005-01-01

The Antarctic Ice Sheet is surrounded by large floating ice shelves that spread under their own weight into the ocean. Ice shelf rigidity depends on ice temperature and fabrics, and is influenced by ice flow and the delicate balance between bottom and surface accumulation. Here, we use an inverse control method to infer the rigidity of the Ronne Ice Shelf that best matches observations of ice velocity from satellite radar interferometry. Ice rigidity, or flow law parameter B, is shown to vary between 300 and 900 kPa a(sup 1/3). Ice is softer along the side margins due to frictional heating, and harder along the outflow of large glaciers, which advect cold continental ice. Melting at the bottom surface of the ice shelf increases its rigidity, while freezing decreases it. Accurate numerical modelling of ice shelf flow must account for this spatial variability in mechanical characteristics.

Flight test report of the NASA icing research airplane: Performance, stability, and control after flight through natural icing conditions

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Jordan, J. L.; Platz, S. J.; Schinstock, W. C.

1986-01-01

Flight test results are presented documenting the effect of airframe icing on performance and stability and control of a NASA DHC-6 icing research aircraft. Kohlman System Research, Inc., provided the data acquisition system and data analysis under contract to NASA. Performance modeling methods and MMLE techniques were used to determine the effects of natural ice on the aircraft. Results showed that ice had a significant effect on the drag coefficient of the aircraft and a modest effect on the MMLE derived longitudinal stability coefficients (code version MMLE). Data is also presented on asymmetric power sign slip maneuvers showing rudder floating characteristics with and without ice on the vertical stabilizer.

Role of ice-ocean interaction on glacier instability: Results from numerical modeling applied to Petermann Glacier (Invited)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Nick, F.; Hubbard, A.; Vieli, A.; van der Veen, C. J.; Box, J. E.; Bates, R.; Luckman, A. J.

2009-12-01

Calving of icebergs and bottom melting from ice shelves accounts for roughly half the ice transferred from the Greenland Ice Sheet into the surrounding ocean, and virtually all of the ice loss from the Antarctic Ice Sheet. Petermann Glacier (north Greenland) with its 16 km wide and 80 km long floating tongue, experiences massive bottom melting. We apply a numerical ice flow model using a physically-based calving criterion based on crevasse depth to investigate the contribution of processes such as bottom melting, sea ice or sikkusak disintegration, surface run off and iceberg calving to the mass balance and instability of Petermann Glacier and its ice shelf. Our modeling study provides insights into the role of ice-ocean interaction, and on how to incorporate calving in ice sheet models, improving our ability to predict future ice sheet change.

Role of ice-ocean interaction on glacier instability: Results from numerical modelling applied to Petermann Glacier

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Nick, Faezeh M.; Hubbard, Alun; van der Veen, Kees; Vieli, Andreas

2010-05-01

Calving of icebergs and bottom melting from ice shelves accounts for roughly half the ice transferred from the Greenland Ice Sheet into the surrounding ocean, and virtually all of the ice loss from the Antarctic Ice Sheet. Petermann Glacier (north Greenland) with its 16 km wide and 80 km long floating tongue, experiences massive bottom melting. We apply a numerical ice flow model using a physically-based calving criterion based on crevasse depth to investigate the contribution of processes such as bottom melting, sea ice or sikkusak disintegration, surface run off and iceberg calving to the mass balance and instability of Petermann Glacier and its ice shelf. Our modelling study provides insights into the role of ice-ocean interaction, and on how to incorporate calving in ice sheet models, improving our ability to predict future ice sheet change.

Evidence for an ice shelf covering the central Arctic Ocean during the penultimate glaciation

USGS Publications Warehouse

Jakobsson, Martin; Nilsson, Johan; Anderson, Leif G.; Backman, Jan; Bjork, Goran; Cronin, Thomas M.; Kirchner, Nina; Koshurnikov, Andrey; Mayer, Larry; Noormets, Riko; O'Regan, Matthew; Stranne, Christian; Ananiev, Roman; Macho, Natalia Barrientos; Cherniykh, Dennis; Coxall, Helen; Eriksson, Bjorn; Floden, Tom; Gemery, Laura; Gustafsson, Orjan; Jerram, Kevin; Johansson, Carina; Khortov, Alexey; Mohammad, Rezwan; Semiletov, Igor

2016-01-01

The hypothesis of a km-thick ice shelf covering the entire Arctic Ocean during peak glacial conditions was proposed nearly half a century ago. Floating ice shelves preserve few direct traces after their disappearance, making reconstructions difficult. Seafloor imprints of ice shelves should, however, exist where ice grounded along their flow paths. Here we present new evidence of ice-shelf groundings on bathymetric highs in the central Arctic Ocean, resurrecting the concept of an ice shelf extending over the entire central Arctic Ocean during at least one previous ice age. New and previously mapped glacial landforms together reveal flow of a spatially coherent, in some regions >1-km thick, central Arctic Ocean ice shelf dated to marine isotope stage 6 (~140 ka). Bathymetric highs were likely critical in the ice-shelf development by acting as pinning points where stabilizing ice rises formed, thereby providing sufficient back stress to allow ice shelf thickening.

Brinicles as a case of inverse chemical gardens.

PubMed

Cartwright, Julyan H E; Escribano, Bruno; González, Diego L; Sainz-Díaz, C Ignacio; Tuval, Idan

2013-06-25

Brinicles are hollow tubes of ice from centimeters to meters in length that form under floating sea ice in the polar oceans when dense, cold brine drains downward from sea ice to seawater close to its freezing point. When this extremely cold brine leaves the ice, it freezes the water it comes into contact with: a hollow tube of ice-a brinicle-growing downward around the plume of descending brine. We show that brinicles can be understood as a form of the self-assembled tubular precipitation structures termed chemical gardens, which are plantlike structures formed on placing together a soluble metal salt, often in the form of a seed crystal, and an aqueous solution of one of many anions, often silicate. On one hand, in the case of classical chemical gardens, an osmotic pressure difference across a semipermeable precipitation membrane that filters solutions by rejecting the solute leads to an inflow of water and to its rupture. The internal solution, generally being lighter than the external solution, flows up through the break, and as it does so, a tube grows upward by precipitation around the jet of internal solution. Such chemical-garden tubes can grow to many centimeters in length. In the case of brinicles, on the other hand, in floating sea ice we have porous ice in a mushy layer that filters out water, by freezing it, and allows concentrated brine through. Again there is an osmotic pressure difference leading to a continuing ingress of seawater in a siphon pump mechanism that is sustained as long as the ice continues to freeze. Because the brine that is pumped out is denser than the seawater and descends rather than rises, a brinicle is a downward-growing tube of ice, an inverse chemical garden.

Grounding line migration of Petermann Gletscher, north Greenland, detected using satellite radar interferometry

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Rignot, Eric

1997-01-01

Ice Sheet grounding lines are sensitive indicator of changes in ice thickness, sea level or elevation of the sea bed. Here, we use the synthetic-aperture radar interferometry technique to detect the migration of thel imit of tidal flexing, or hinge line, of Petermann Gletscher, a major outlet glacier of north Greenland which develops an extensive floating tongue.

Petermann Glacier, North Greenland: massive calving in 2010 and the past half century

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Johannessen, O. M.; Babiker, M.; Miles, M. W.

2011-01-01

Greenland's marine-terminating glaciers drain large amounts of solid ice through calving of icebergs, as well as melting of floating glacial ice. Petermann Glacier, North Greenland, has the Northern Hemisphere's long floating ice shelf. A massive (~270 km2) calving event was observed from satellite sensors in August 2010. In order to understand this in perspective, here we perform a comprehensive retrospective data analysis of Petermann Glacier calving-front variability spanning half a century. Here we establish that there have been at least four massive (100+ km2) calving events over the past 50 years: (1) 1959-1961 (~153 km2), (2) 1991 (~168 km2), (3) 2001 (~71 km2) and (4) 2010 (~270 km2), as well as ~31 km2 calved in 2008. The terminus position in 2010 has retreated ~15 km beyond the envelope of previous observations. Whether the massive calving in 2010 represents natural episodic variability or a response to global and/or ocean warming in the fjord remains speculative, although this event supports the contention that the ice shelf recently has become vulnerable due to extensive fracturing and channelized basal melting.

Buttressing and stability of marine Ice sheets

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Goldberg, D.; Holland, D. M.; Schoof, C.

2009-04-01

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is marine in nature, meaning most of its base is below sea level. At the grounding line (where it becomes thin enough to float), its outlet streams flow into large ice shelves. Gravitational stress in the shelf is transmitted back to the grounding line, and largely balanced by basal friction in the transition zone. The details of this force balance control the evolution of both the thickness and grounded extent of the ice sheet, and can lead to Weertman's (1974) Marine Instability for a foredeepened bedrock (one that deepens inland). However, the presence of rigid sidewalls and locally grounded regions in the shelf can reduce the longitudinal stresses felt at the grounding line (a phenomenon called buttressing). Thomas (1979) and others pointed out that Marine Instability may be lessened or reversed by ice shelf buttressing. When modelling marine ice sheets numerically, the physics of the grounded-to-floating transition must be represented and the associated small length scales must be resolved (Schoof, 2007). Failing to do so can result in nonphysical or numerically inconsistent behavior (Vieli and Payne, 2005). While several methods have been developed to treat these issues (Vieli and Payne, 2005; Pattyn et al, 2006; Schoof, 2007) they are limited to flowline models. We present a model that represents the physics of the grounded-to-floating transition in a time-dependent three-dimensional marine ice sheet, using mesh adaption to resolve the transition zone. We show that in the special case of a two-dimensional sheet our model reproduces the theoretical results of the MISMIP experiments, and that it produces robust results when both horizontal dimensions are resolved. In idealized experiments in a channel with rigid sidewalls and a foredeepened bed, we narrow the channel to determine whether buttressing is sufficient to reverse instability. We find that for strong beds (high friction coefficients), while the timescales and dynamics are affected greatly by buttressing, true stability reversal is still not seen even as the channel becomes quite narrow. However, for weaker beds, stability is seen, though it can be shown that sufficient ocean melting can still cause collapse. Experiments with more complicated bed topography show that locally grounded areas (ice rises) have similar dynamic effects to rigid sidewalls.

Warm water and life beneath the grounding zone of an Antarctic outlet glacier

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Sugiyama, Shin; Sawagaki, Takanobu; Fukuda, Takehiro

2013-04-01

Ice-ocean interaction plays a key role in rapidly changing Antarctic ice sheet margins. Recent studies demonstrated that warming ocean is eroding floating part of the ice sheet, resulting in thinning, retreat and acceleration of ice shelves and outlet glaciers. Field data are necessary to understand such processes, but direct observations at the interface of ice and the ocean are lacking, particularly beneath the grounding zone. To better understand the interaction of Antarctic ice sheet and the ocean, we performed subglacial measurements through boreholes drilled in the grounding zone of Langhovde Glacier, an outlet glacier in East Antarctica. Langhovde Glacier is located at 69°12'S, 39°48'E, approximately 20 km south of a Japanese research station Syowa. The glacier discharges ice into Lützow-holm Bay through a 3-km-wide floating terminus at a rate of 130 m a-1. Fast flowing feature is confined by bedrock to the west and slow moving ice to the east, and it extends about 10 km upglacier from the calving front. In 2011/12 austral summer season, we operated a hot water drilling system to drill through the glacier at 2.5 and 3 km from the terminus. Inspections of the boreholes revealed the ice was underlain by a shallow saline water layer. Ice and water column thicknesses were found to be 398 and 24 m at the first site, and 431 and 10 m at the second site. Judging from ice surface and bed elevations, the drilling sites were situated at within a several hundred meters from the grounding line. Sensors were lowered into the boreholes to measure temperature, salinity and current within the subglacial water layer. Salinity and temperature from the two sites were fairly uniform (34.25±0.05 PSU and -1.45±0.05°C), indicating vertical and horizontal mixing in the layer. The measured temperature was >0.7°C warmer than the in-situ freezing point, and very similar to the values measured in the open ocean near the glacier front. Subglacial current was up to 3 cm/s, which is sufficient to carry coastal water to the study sites within several days. A video camera suspended in the boreholes captured a crustacean and krill beneath the grounding zone. Subglacial water samples contained abundant phytoplankton, which were most likely transported from the open ocean and served as trophic resources to the animals living under >400 m thick glacier. Our observations indicate that warm coastal water is actively transported to the grounding zone by subshelf current, and efficiently melting the floating ice bottom. It is also implied that changes in the ocean would immediately reach and influence physical and biological environment beneath the grounding zone.

Tidal bending of ice shelves as a mechanism for large-scale temporal variations in ice flow

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Rosier, Sebastian H. R.; Hilmar Gudmundsson, G.

2018-05-01

GPS measurements reveal strong modulation of horizontal ice shelf and ice stream flow at a variety of tidal frequencies, most notably a fortnightly (Msf) frequency not present in the vertical tides themselves. Current theories largely fail to explain the strength and prevalence of this signal over floating ice shelves. We show how well-known non-linear aspects of ice rheology can give rise to widespread, long-periodic tidal modulation in ice shelf flow, generated within ice shelves themselves through tidal flexure acting at diurnal and semidiurnal frequencies. Using full-Stokes viscoelastic modelling, we show that inclusion of tidal bending within the model accounts for much of the observed tidal modulation of ice shelf flow. Furthermore, our model shows that, in the absence of vertical tidal forcing, the mean flow of the ice shelf is reduced by almost 30 % for the geometry that we consider.

Ice-front change and iceberg behaviour along Oates and George V Coasts, Antarctica, 1912-96

USGS Publications Warehouse

Frezzotti, M.; Cimbelli, A.; Ferrigno, J.G.

1998-01-01

Ice-front change may well be a sensitive indicator of regional climate change. We have studied the western Oates Coast from Cape Kinsey (158??50'E, 69??19'S) to Cape Hudson (153??45'E, 68??20'S) and the entire George V Coast, from Cape Hudson to Point Alden (142??02'E, 66??48'S). The glaciers here drain part of the Dome Charlie and Talos Dome areas (640 000 km2). A comparison between various documents, dated several years apart, has allowed an estimate of the surficial ice discharge, the ice-front fluctuation and the iceberg-calving flux during the last 50 years. The ice-front discharge of the studied coast has been estimated at about 90??12 km3 a-1 in 1989-91, 8.5 km3 a-1 for western Oates Coast and 82 km3 a-1 for George V Coast. From 1962-63 to 1973-74 the floating glaciers underwent a net reduction that continued from 1973-74 to 1989-91. On the other hand, from 1989-91 to 1996 the area of floating glaciers increased. Ninnis Glacier Tongue and the western part of Cook Ice Shelf underwent a significant retreat after 1980 and 1947, respectively. Satellite-image analysis of large icebergs has provided information about ice-ocean interaction and the existence of an 'iceberg trap' along George V Coast. A first estimate of the mass balance of the drainage basin of Mertz and Ninnis Glaciers shows a value close to zero or slightly negative.

Classification of freshwater ice conditions on the Alaskan Arctic Coastal Plain using ground penetrating radar and TerraSAR-X satellite data

USGS Publications Warehouse

Jones, Benjamin M.; Gusmeroli, Alessio; Arp, Christopher D.; Strozzi, Tazio; Grosse, Guido; Gaglioti, Benjamin V.; Whitman, Matthew S.

2013-01-01

Arctic freshwater ecosystems have responded rapidly to climatic changes over the last half century. Lakes and rivers are experiencing a thinning of the seasonal ice cover, which may increase potential over-wintering freshwater habitat, winter water supply for industrial withdrawal, and permafrost degradation. Here, we combined the use of ground penetrating radar (GPR) and high-resolution (HR) spotlight TerraSAR-X (TSX) satellite data (1.25 m resolution) to identify and characterize floating ice and grounded ice conditions in lakes, ponds, beaded stream pools, and an alluvial river channel. Classified ice conditions from the GPR and the TSX data showed excellent agreement: 90.6% for a predominantly floating ice lake, 99.7% for a grounded ice lake, 79.0% for a beaded stream course, and 92.1% for the alluvial river channel. A GIS-based analysis of 890 surface water features larger than 0.01 ha showed that 42% of the total surface water area potentially provided over-wintering habitat during the 2012/2013 winter. Lakes accounted for 89% of this area, whereas the alluvial river channel accounted for 10% and ponds and beaded stream pools each accounted for <1%. Identification of smaller landscape features such as beaded stream pools may be important because of their distribution and role in connecting other water bodies on the landscape. These findings advance techniques for detecting and knowledge associated with potential winter habitat distribution for fish and invertebrates at the local scale in a region of the Arctic with increasing stressors related to climate and land use change.

Thermal Effects on the "Ice-Cube Puzzle"

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Lima, F. M. S.; Monteiro, F. F.

2012-01-01

When an ice cube floating on water in a container melts, it is said in some textbooks that the water level does not change. However, as pointed out by Lan in a recent work, when the buoyant force from a less dense fluid resting above the waterline is taken into account, one should expect a detectable "increase" in the volume of water. Here in this…

Late Holocene glacial history of Petermann Fjord, Northwest Greenland: Non-destructive CT, XRF, and magnetic results from OD1507 sediment cores

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Reilly, B. T.; Stoner, J. S.; Mix, A. C.; Jakobsson, M.; Jennings, A. E.; Walczak, M.; Dyke, L. M.; Cheseby, M.; Albert, S. W.; Wiest, J.

2016-12-01

An international and interdisciplinary expedition to Nares Strait and Petermann Fjord, Northwest Greenland, onboard the Swedish Icebreaker Oden July-September 2015 (OD1507) sought to understand the Holocene history of the Petermann glacial system among other research objectives. Petermann Glacier, which terminates as a floating ice-tongue in Petermann Fjord, is thought to be especially sensitive to ice-ocean interactions. While limited historical observations dating back to 1876 suggest the Petermann Ice Tongue extends about 70-90 km from the grounding-line, large calving events in 2010 and 2012 reduced the ice-tongue extent to about 45 km from the grounding-line. A suite of 14 marine sediment cores recovered a range of glacio-marine facies that form an along fjord (15-80 km from the grounding-line) and an across fjord depth (473-1041 meters water depth) transect. CT scans clearly identify four primary fjord facies, including bioturbated, IRD-rich, laminated and mud with stratified graded sand layers. The latter of these occurs near the modern grounding-line. Additionally, a new MATLAB routine is used to quantify clasts >2 mm in size from the CT scans. XRF sediment geochemical changes mirror magnetic mineral concentrations and are driven by varying contribution of Ca-rich and Ca-poor sources, which we interpret as a reflection of the mixing of the local carbonate rocks and crystalline basement excavated by the ice sheet. Initial paleomagnetic results isolate a strong and stable characteristic remanent magnetization which show remarkable similarity to paleosecular variation (PSV) recorded in nearby mid-late Holocene varved lakes on Ellesmere Island. This non-destructive dataset provides robust correlations, indicating a coherent and dynamic record of changes in the Petermann glacial system during the late Holocene, including evidence for a significant grounding-line retreat followed by the growth and relative paleo-extent of the modern Petermann Ice Tongue.

Investigating ice shelf mass loss processes from continuous satellite altimetry

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fricker, H. A.

2017-12-01

The Antarctic Ice Sheet continually gains mass through snowfall over its large area and, to remain approximately in equilibrium, it sheds most of this excess mass through two processes, basal melting and iceberg calving, that both occur in the floating ice shelves surrounding the continent. Small amounts of mass are also lost by surface melting, which occurs on many ice shelves every summer to varying degrees, and has been linked to ice-shelf collapse via hydrofracture on ice shelves that have been pre-weakened. Ice shelves provide mechanical support to `buttress' seaward flow of grounded ice, so that ice-shelf thinning and retreat result in enhanced ice discharge to the ocean. Ice shelves are susceptible to changes in forcing from both the atmosphere and the ocean, which both change on a broad range of timescales to modify mass gains and losses at the surface and base, and from internal instabilities of the ice sheet itself. Mass loss from iceberg calving is episodic, with typical intervals between calving events on the order of decades. Since ice shelves are so vast, the only viable way to monitor them is with satellites. Here, we discuss results from satellite radar and laser altimeter data from one NASA satellite (ICESat), and four ESA satellites (ERS-1, ERS-2, Envisat, CryoSat-2) to obtain estimates of ice-shelf surface height since the early 1990s. The continuous time series show accelerated losses in total Antarctic ice-shelf volume from 1994 to 2017, and allow us to investigate the processes causing ice-shelf mass change. For Larsen C, much of the variability comes from changing atmospheric conditions affecting firn state. In the Amundsen Sea, the rapid thinning is a combination of accelerated ocean-driven thinning and ice dynamics. This long-term thinning signal is, however, is strongly modulated by ENSO-driven interannual variability. However, observations of ocean variability around Antarctica are sparse, since these regions are often covered in sea ice and difficult to access. Some innovative methods are being used to acquire these data, including airborne deployment of ALAMO profiling floats which we tested in the Ross Sea as part of the ROSETTA-Ice project. Combining these altimeter datasets and in situ ocean datasets will allow us to examine processes causing basal melting in the sub-ice-shelf cavities.

Ice-Shelf Tidal Flexure and Subglacial Pressure Variations

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Walker, Ryan T.; Parizek, Byron R.; Alley, Richard B.; Anandakrishnan, Sridhar; Riverman, Kiya L.; Christianson, Knut

2013-01-01

We develop a model of an ice shelf-ice stream system as a viscoelastic beam partially supported by an elastic foundation. When bed rock near the grounding line acts as a fulcrum, leverage from the ice shelf dropping at low tide can cause significant (approx 1 cm) uplift in the first few kilometers of grounded ice.This uplift and the corresponding depression at high tide lead to basal pressure variations of sufficient magnitude to influence subglacial hydrology.Tidal flexure may thus affect basal lubrication, sediment flow, and till strength, all of which are significant factors in ice-stream dynamics and grounding-line stability. Under certain circumstances, our results suggest the possibility of seawater being drawn into the subglacial water system. The presence of sea water beneath grounded ice would significantly change the radar reflectivity of the grounding zone and complicate the interpretation of grounded versus floating ice based on ice-penetrating radar observations.

Integrated Airborne and In-Situ Measurements over Land-Fast Ice near Barrow, AK

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Brozena, J. M.; Gardner, J. M.; Liang, R.; Vermillion, M.; Ball, D.; Stoudt, C. A.; Geiger, C. A.; Woods, J. E.; Samluk, J.; Deliberty, T. L.

2013-12-01

During March of 2013, the Naval Research Laboratory, the University of Delaware and the US Naval Academy collected an integrated set of measurements over the largely floating, but land-fast ice near the coast of Barrow, AK. The purpose of the collection was to compare airborne remote sensing methods of collection to in-situ ground-truth measurements. Airborne measurements include scanning LiDAR (Riegl Q 680i), digital photogrammetry (Applanix DSS-439) and a short-pulse (~ 1 nsec) 10 GHz radar altimeter. The LiDAR measures total freeboard (ice + snow) referenced to leads in the ice. The radar measures approximate ice freeboard with the difference with the LiDAR providing an estimate of snow thickness. The freeboard measurements are aimed at estimating ice thickness via estimates of densities and isostasy. The photogrammetry was used to measure ice motion over free-floating sea-ice, but provided only a velocity calibration and general situational awareness over the land-fast ice. Ground measurements were collected along a transect, and included boreholes, snow-thickness (Magnaprobe), and ice thickness (EM31). Airborne data were collected on six overflights of this transect over a three week period. LiDAR swath widths ranged from 200-300m (depending on altitude) and encompassed three grounded ridges which remained essentially stationary over the collection period, that together with the shoreline, provided fixed reference points to compare the heights of the floating ice that varied with the tide (and to some extent the snow conditions). Sampling size or 'footprint' plays a critical role in the attempt to compare in-situ measurements with airborne (or satellite) measurements. Boreholes are point measurements and are difficult enough to obtain, that only a limited number are practical during a survey period. EM31 and Magnaprobe instrumentation allows collection of snow and ice thickness along one-dimensional profiles, and several adjacent profiles can be collected to approximate a two-dimensional swath, assuming that the spacing between profiles does not lead to unacceptable aliasing. For this project we collected two em31 profiles roughly 3-5m apart and two profiles of Magnaprobe snow thickness with separation varying from 1-20 m. The radar footprint is ~ 10-15m at our survey altitudes, and at least somewhat comparable. The LiDAR had a ground point spacing of ~25 cm and so easily encompassed the EM31, Magnaprobe and radar data. Measured snow thickness was minimal, averaging 9 cm on the date of the first collection and 12 cm on the second. Airborne radar data were compared to the LiDAR by applying a circular, weighted kernel to the LiDAR measurements surrounding the radar profile and commensurate in diameter to the radar footprint. Estimated snow thickness is then obtained from the difference of the radar and averaged LiDAR. Ice thickness was then calculated from the freeboard measurements and compared to the boreholes. Using these data sets we hope to address important questions such as: How can we improve co-registration between ground and airborne campaigns by taking advantage of land-fast ice as a non-moving ice field? How can we improve co-registration on drift ice by building from such activities? Is there spatial aliasing of sea ice at different resolutions and if so, what is the impact on sea ice volume and ice thickness distribution?

Investigating role of ice-ocean interaction on glacier dynamic: Results from numerical modeling applied to Petermann Glacier

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Nick, F. M.; van der Veen, C. J.; Vieli, A.; Pattyn, F.; Hubbard, A.; Box, J. E.

2010-12-01

Calving of icebergs and bottom melting from ice shelves accounts for roughly half the ice transferred from the Greenland Ice Sheet into the surrounding ocean, and virtually all of the ice loss from the Antarctic Ice Sheet. Petermann Glacier (north Greenland) with its ~17 km wide and ~ 60 km long floating ice-shelf is experiencing high rates of bottom melting. The recent partial disintegration of its shelf (in August 2010) presents a natural experiment to investigate the dynamic response of the ice sheet to its shelf retreat. We apply a numerical ice flow model using a physically-based calving criterion based on crevasse depth to investigate the contribution of processes such as shelf disintegration, bottom melting, sea ice or sikkusak disintegration and surface run off to the mass balance of Petermann Glacier and assess its stability. Our modeling study provides insights into the role of ice-ocean interaction, and on response of Petermann Glacier to its recent massive ice loss.

Evidence for an ice shelf covering the central Arctic Ocean during the penultimate glaciation

PubMed Central

Jakobsson, Martin; Nilsson, Johan; Anderson, Leif; Backman, Jan; Björk, Göran; Cronin, Thomas M.; Kirchner, Nina; Koshurnikov, Andrey; Mayer, Larry; Noormets, Riko; O'Regan, Matthew; Stranne, Christian; Ananiev, Roman; Barrientos Macho, Natalia; Cherniykh, Denis; Coxall, Helen; Eriksson, Björn; Flodén, Tom; Gemery, Laura; Gustafsson, Örjan; Jerram, Kevin; Johansson, Carina; Khortov, Alexey; Mohammad, Rezwan; Semiletov, Igor

2016-01-01

The hypothesis of a km-thick ice shelf covering the entire Arctic Ocean during peak glacial conditions was proposed nearly half a century ago. Floating ice shelves preserve few direct traces after their disappearance, making reconstructions difficult. Seafloor imprints of ice shelves should, however, exist where ice grounded along their flow paths. Here we present new evidence of ice-shelf groundings on bathymetric highs in the central Arctic Ocean, resurrecting the concept of an ice shelf extending over the entire central Arctic Ocean during at least one previous ice age. New and previously mapped glacial landforms together reveal flow of a spatially coherent, in some regions >1-km thick, central Arctic Ocean ice shelf dated to marine isotope stage 6 (∼140 ka). Bathymetric highs were likely critical in the ice-shelf development by acting as pinning points where stabilizing ice rises formed, thereby providing sufficient back stress to allow ice shelf thickening. PMID:26778247

ICE911 Research: Preserving and Rebuilding Reflective Ice

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Field, L. A.; Chetty, S.; Manzara, A.; Venkatesh, S.

2014-12-01

We have developed a localized surface albedo modification technique that shows promise as a method to increase reflective multi-year ice using floating materials, chosen so as to have low subsidiary environmental impact. It is now well-known that multi-year reflective ice has diminished rapidly in the Arctic over the past 3 decades and this plays a part in the continuing rapid decrease of summer-time ice. As summer-time bright ice disappears, the Arctic is losing its ability to reflect summer insolation, and this has widespread climatic effects, as well as a direct effect on sea level rise, as oceans heat and once-land-based ice melts into the sea. We have tested the albedo modification technique on a small scale over six Winter/Spring seasons at sites including California's Sierra Nevada Mountains, a Canadian lake, and a small man-made lake in Minnesota, using various materials and an evolving array of instrumentation. The materials can float and can be made to minimize effects on marine habitat and species. The instrumentation is designed to be deployed in harsh and remote locations. Localized snow and ice preservation, and reductions in water heating, have been quantified in small-scale testing. We have continued to refine our material and deployment approaches, and we have had laboratory confirmation by NASA. In the field, the materials were successfully deployed to shield underlying snow and ice from melting; applications of granular materials remained stable in the face of local wind and storms. We are evaluating the effects of snow and ice preservation for protection of infrastructure and habitat stabilization, and we are concurrently developing our techniques to aid in water conservation. Localized albedo modification options such as those being studied in this work may act to preserve ice, glaciers, permafrost and seasonal snow areas, and perhaps aid natural ice formation processes. If this method is deployed on a large enough scale, it could conceivably bring about a reduction in the Ice-Albedo Feedback Effect, possibly slowing one of the key effects and factors in climate change.

Fatigue analysis of assembled marine floating platform for special purposes under complex water environments

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Ma, Guang-ying; Yao, Yun-long

2018-03-01

In this paper, the fatigue lives of a new type of assembled marine floating platform for special purposes were studied. Firstly, by using ANSYS AQWA software, the hydrodynamic model of the platform was established. Secondly, the structural stresses under alternating change loads were calculated under complex water environments, such as wind, wave, current and ice. The minimum fatigue lives were obtained under different working conditions. The analysis results showed that the fatigue life of the platform structure can meet the requirements

The impact of a pressurized regional sea or global ocean on stresses on Enceladus

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Johnston, Stephanie A.; Montési, Laurent G. J.

2017-06-01

Liquid water is likely present in the interior of Enceladus, but it is still debated whether this water forms a global ocean or a regional sea and whether the present-day situation is stable. As the heat flux of Enceladus exceeds most heat source estimates, the liquid water is likely cooling and crystallizing, which results in expansion and pressurization of the sea or ocean. We determine, using an axisymmetric Finite Element Model, the tectonic patterns that pressurization of a regional sea or global ocean might produce at the surface of Enceladus. Tension is always predicted above where the ice is thinnest and generates cracks that might be at the origin of the Tiger Stripes. Tectonic activity is also expected in an annulus around the sea if the ice shell is in contact with but slips freely along the rocky core of the satellite. Cracks at the north pole are expected if the shell slips along the core or if there is a global ocean with thin ice at the pole. Water is likely injected along the base of the ice when the shell is grounded, which may lead to cycles of tectonic activity with the shell alternating between floating and grounded states and midlatitude faulting occurring at the transition from a grounded to a floating state.

Representing grounding line migration in synchronous coupling between a marine ice sheet model and a z-coordinate ocean model

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Goldberg, D. N.; Snow, K.; Holland, P.; Jordan, J. R.; Campin, J.-M.; Heimbach, P.; Arthern, R.; Jenkins, A.

2018-05-01

Synchronous coupling is developed between an ice sheet model and a z-coordinate ocean model (the MITgcm). A previously-developed scheme to allow continuous vertical movement of the ice-ocean interface of a floating ice shelf ("vertical coupling") is built upon to allow continuous movement of the grounding line, or point of floatation of the ice sheet ("horizontal coupling"). Horizontal coupling is implemented through the maintenance of a thin layer of ocean ( ∼ 1 m) under grounded ice, which is inflated into the real ocean as the ice ungrounds. This is accomplished through a modification of the ocean model's nonlinear free surface evolution in a manner akin to a hydrological model in the presence of steep bathymetry. The coupled model is applied to a number of idealized geometries and shown to successfully represent ocean-forced marine ice sheet retreat while maintaining a continuous ocean circulation.

Bathymetry in Petermann fjord from Operation IceBridge aerogravity

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Tinto, Kirsty J.; Bell, Robin E.; Cochran, James R.; Münchow, Andreas

2015-07-01

Petermann Glacier is a major glacier in northern Greenland, maintaining one of the few remaining floating ice tongues in Greenland. Monitoring programs, such as NASA's Operation IceBridge have surveyed Petermann Glacier over several decades and have found it to be stable in terms of mass balance, velocity and grounding-line position. The future vulnerability of this large glacier to changing ocean temperatures and climate depends on the ocean-ice interactions beneath its floating tongue. These cannot currently be predicted due to a lack of knowledge of the bathymetry underneath the ice tongue. Here we use aerogravity data from Operation IceBridge, together with airborne radar and laser data and shipborne bathymetry-soundings to model the bathymetry beneath the Petermann ice tongue. We find a basement-cored inner sill at 540-610 m depth that results in a water cavity with minimum thickness of 400 m about 25 km from the grounding line. The sill is coincident with the location of the melt rate minimum. Seaward of the sill the fjord is strongly asymmetric. The deepest point occurs on the eastern side of the fjord at 1150 m, 600 m deeper than on the western side. This asymmetry is due to a sedimentary deposit on the western side of the fjord. A 350-410 m-deep outer sill, also mapped by marine surveys, marks the seaward end of the fjord. This outer sill is aligned with the proposed Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) grounding-line position for Petermann Glacier. The inner sill likely provided a stable pinning point for the grounding line in the past, punctuating the retreat of Petermann Glacier since the LGM.

Endmembers of Ice Shelf Melt

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Boghosian, A.; Child, S. F.; Kingslake, J.; Tedesco, M.; Bell, R. E.; Alexandrov, O.; McMichael, S.

2017-12-01

Studies of surface melt on ice shelves have defined a spectrum of meltwater behavior. On one end the storage of meltwater in persistent surface ponds can trigger ice shelf collapse as in the 2002 event leading to the disintegration of the Larsen B Ice Shelf. On the other, meltwater export by rivers can stabilize an ice shelf as was recently shown on the Nansen Ice Shelf. We explore this dichotomy by quantifying the partitioning between stored and transported water on two glaciers adjacent to floating ice shelves, Nimrod (Antarctica) and Peterman (Greenland). We analyze optical satellite imagery (LANDSAT, WorldView), airborne imagery (Operation IceBridge, Trimetrogon Aerial Phototography), satellite radar (Sentinel-1), and digital elevation models (DEMs) to categorize surface meltwater fate and map the evolution of ice shelf hydrology and topographic features through time. On the floating Peterman Glacier tongue a sizable river exports water to the ocean. The surface hydrology of Nimrod Glacier, geometrically similar to Peterman but with ten times shallower surface slope, is dominated by storage in surface lakes. In contrast, the Nansen has the same surface slope as Nimrod but transports water through surface rivers. Slope alone is not the sole control on ice shelf hydrology. It is essential to track the storage and transport volumes for each of these systems. To estimate water storage and transport we analyze high resolution (40 cm - 2 m) modern and historical DEMs. We produce historical (1957 onwards) DEMs with structure-from-motion photogrammetry. The DEMs are used to constrain water storage potential estimates of observed basins and water routing/transport potential. We quantify the total volume of water stored seasonally and interannually. We use the normalize difference water index to map meltwater extent, and estimate lake water depth from optical data. We also consider the role of stored water in subsurface aquifers in recharging surface water after observing a pond and river reemerge after apparently freezing during the 2016-17 melt season. Using the ponds/rivers endmember scheme helps us to constrain the role storage and transport play on stabilizing ice shelves. By extending this analysis to other ice tongues and shelves we can better understand their vulnerability to a warming world.

Petermann Glacier, North Greenland: Large Ice-Discharge Episodes from 20 Years of Satellite Observations

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Babiker, M.; Johannessen, O. M.; Miles, M. W.; Miles, V. V.

2009-12-01

The major marine-terminating outlet glaciers of Greenland can undergo large mass losses through calving of icebergs and bottom melting from floating ice tongues. Recent observations of outlet glaiers around Greenland have shown that large and rapid changes in solid-ice fluxes are possible. The Petermann glacier in remote northern Greenland is the region’s largest floating-tongue glacier (~70 km by 10 km). In summer 2008 a large calving event was observed, as well as large cracks upstream of the remaining calving front, portending a more massive near-term loss. These observations may herald extraordinary and unprecedented change. However, the long-term variability of calving events and ice velocities are poorly known. Our research goal here is to identify the temporal variability and possible trends in solid-ice flux indicators - variability of the calving front and ice velocity - for Petermann glacier. The methodological approach is observational, based primarily on analysis of 20 years of repetitive satellite data over a period starting from 1990, together with sporadic earlier observations. The multisensor data range from high-resolution optical images from Landsat, SPOT and Terra ASTER and high-resolution synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images from ERS and ENVISAT. These disparate data have been imported, geo-registered and analysed within a Geographic Information System. The following measurements are made: (1) delineating changes in the calving front, (2) estimating the area of glacial ice loss during calving events, and (3) estimating the ice-surface velocity using sequential satellite images. We find evidence of a number of previous calving episodes of similar magnitude to the summer 2008. The ice-velocity estimates compare well with other estimates for particular years, and moreover are relatively consistent during the 20-year period. These findings suggest business-as-usual for Petermann glacier; however, a near-term calving event exceeding those observed over the past 20 years cannot be ruled out.

Arctic sea ice decline contributes to thinning lake ice trend in northern Alaska

USGS Publications Warehouse

Alexeev, Vladimir; Arp, Christopher D.; Jones, Benjamin M.; Cai, Lei

2016-01-01

Field measurements, satellite observations, and models document a thinning trend in seasonal Arctic lake ice growth, causing a shift from bedfast to floating ice conditions. September sea ice concentrations in the Arctic Ocean since 1991 correlate well (r = +0.69,p < 0.001) to this lake regime shift. To understand how and to what extent sea ice affects lakes, we conducted model experiments to simulate winters with years of high (1991/92) and low (2007/08) sea ice extent for which we also had field measurements and satellite imagery characterizing lake ice conditions. A lake ice growth model forced with Weather Research and Forecasting model output produced a 7% decrease in lake ice growth when 2007/08 sea ice was imposed on 1991/92 climatology and a 9% increase in lake ice growth for the opposing experiment. Here, we clearly link early winter 'ocean-effect' snowfall and warming to reduced lake ice growth. Future reductions in sea ice extent will alter hydrological, biogeochemical, and habitat functioning of Arctic lakes and cause sub-lake permafrost thaw.

Can Thermal Bending Fracture Ice Shelves?

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

MacAyeal, D. R.; Sergienko, O. V.; Banwell, A. F.; Willis, I.; Macdonald, G. J.; Lin, J.

2017-12-01

Visco-elastic plates will bend if the temperature on one side is cooled. If the plate is constrained to float, as for sea ice floes, this bending will lead to tensile stresses that can fracture the ice. The hydroacoustic regime below sea ice displays increased fracture-sourced noise when air temperatures above the ice cools with the diurnal cycle. The McMurdo Ice Shelf, Antarctica, also displays a massive increase in seismicity during the cooling phase of the diurnal cycle, and this motivates the question: Can surface cooling (or other forcing with thermal consequences) drive through-thickness fracture leading to iceberg calving? Past study of this question for sea ice gives an upper limit of ice-plate thickness (order meters) for which diurnal-scale thermal bending fracture can occur; but could cooling with longer time scales induce fracture of thicker ice plates? Given the seismic evidence of thermal bending fracture on the McMurdo Ice Shelf, the authors examine this question further.

Worldwide Emerging Environmental Issues Affecting the U.S. Military. March 2007 Report

DTIC Science & Technology

2007-03-01

some existent climate regions (mainly in tropical mountain areas, Amazon and Indonesian rainforests , and towards the poles) and the prospects of...ice sheets and floating sea ice. Military Implications: In view of the increasing importance of the Arctic in military planning and the oil reserves...95080 4.2 Malacca Straits Need Increased Protection from Various Security Threats The Malacca Strait, one of the most important shipping lanes in the

Viscous grounding lines

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Worster, Grae; Huppert, Herbert; Robison, Rosalyn; Nandkishore, Rahul; Rajah, Luke

2008-11-01

We have used simple laboratory experiments with viscous fluids to explore the dynamics of grounding lines between Antarctic marine ice sheets and the freely floating ice shelves into which they develop. Ice sheets are shear-dominated gravity currents, while ice shelves are extensional gravity currents with zero shear to leading order. Though ice sheets have non-Newtonian rheology, fundamental aspects of their flow can be explored using Newtonian fluid mechanics. We have derived a mathematical model of this flow that incorporates a new dynamic boundary condition for the position of the grounding line, where the gravity current loses contact with the solid base. Good agreement between our theoretical predictions and our experimental measurements, made using gravity currents of syrup flowing down a rigid slope into a deep, dense salt solution, gives confidence in the fundamental assumptions of our model, which can be incorporated into shallow-ice models to make important predictions regarding the dynamical stability of marine ice sheets.

Analogue modelling of the influence of ice shelf collapse on the flow of ice sheets grounded below sea-level

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Corti, Giacomo; Zeoli, Antonio

2016-04-01

The sudden breakup of ice shelves is expected to result in significant acceleration of inland glaciers, a process related to the removal of the buttressing effect exerted by the ice shelf on the tributary glaciers. This effect has been tested in previous analogue models, which however applied to ice sheets grounded above sea level (e.g., East Antarctic Ice Sheet; Antarctic Peninsula and the Larsen Ice Shelf). In this work we expand these previous results by performing small-scale laboratory models that analyse the influence of ice shelf collapse on the flow of ice streams draining an ice sheet grounded below sea level (e.g., the West Antarctic Ice Sheet). The analogue models, with dimensions (width, length, thickness) of 120x70x1.5cm were performed at the Tectonic Modelling Laboratory of CNR-IGG of Florence, Italy, by using Polydimethilsyloxane (PDMS) as analogue for the flowing ice. This transparent, Newtonian silicone has been shown to well approximate the rheology of natural ice. The silicone was allowed to flow into a water reservoir simulating natural conditions in which ice streams flow into the sea, terminating in extensive ice shelves which act as a buttress for their glaciers and slow their flow. The geometric scaling ratio was 10(-5), such that 1cm in the models simulated 1km in nature; velocity of PDMS (a few mm per hour) simulated natural velocities of 100-1000 m/year. Instability of glacier flow was induced by manually removing a basal silicone platform (floating on water) exerting backstresses to the flowing analogue glacier: the simple set-up adopted in the experiments isolates the effect of the removal of the buttressing effect that the floating platform exerts on the flowing glaciers, thus offering insights into the influence of this parameter on the flow perturbations resulting from a collapse event. The experimental results showed a significant increase in glacier velocity close to its outlet following ice shelf breakup, a process similar to what observed in previous models. This transient effect did not significantly propagate upstream towards the inner parts of ice sheet, and rapidly decayed with time. The process was also accompanied by significant ice thinning. Models results suggest that the ice sheet is almost unaffected by flow perturbations induced by ice shelf collapse, unless other processes (e.g., grounding line instability induced by warm water penetration) are involved.

Sediment features at the grounding zone and beneath Ekström Ice Shelf, East Antarctica, imaged using on-ice vibroseis.

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Smith, Emma C.; Eisen, Olaf; Hofstede, Coen; Lambrecht, Astrid; Mayer, Christoph

2017-04-01

The grounding zone, where an ice sheet becomes a floating ice shelf, is known to be a key threshold region for ice flow and stability. A better understanding of ice dynamics and sediment transport across such zones will improve knowledge about contemporary and palaeo ice flow, as well as past ice extent. Here we present a set of seismic reflection profiles crossing the grounding zone and continuing to the shelf edge of Ekström Ice Shelf, East Antarctica. Using an on-ice vibroseis source combined with a snowstreamer we have imaged a range of sub-glacial and sub-shelf sedimentary and geomorphological features; from layered sediment deposits to elongated flow features. The acoustic properties of the features as well as their morphology allow us to draw conclusions as to their material properties and origin. These results will eventually be integrated with numerical models of ice dynamics to quantify past and present interactions between ice and the solid Earth in East Antarctica; leading to a better understanding of future contributions of this region to sea-level rise.

Ice sheet-ocean interactions and sea level change

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Heimbach, Patrick

2014-03-01

Mass loss from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets has increased rapidly since the mid-1990s. Their combined loss now accounts for about one-third of global sea level rise. In Greenland, a growing body of evidence points to the marine margins of these glaciers as the region from which this dynamic response originated. Similarly, ice streams in West Antarctica that feed vast floating ice shelves have exhibited large decadal changes. We review observational evidence and present physical mechanisms that might explain the observed changes, in particular in the context of ice sheet-ocean interactions. Processes involve cover 7 orders of magnitudes of scales, ranging from mm boundary-layer processes to basin-scale coupled atmosphere-ocean variability. We discuss observational needs to fill the gap in our mechanistic understanding.

Chacterization of Teleseismic Earthquakes Observed on an Ice Shelf

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Baker, M. G.; Aster, R. C.; Anthony, R. E.; Wiens, D.; Nyblade, A.; Bromirski, P. D.; Stephen, R. A.; Gerstoft, P.

2016-12-01

Broadband seismographs deployed atop large tabular icebergs and ice shelves record a rich superposition of atmospheric, oceanic, and solid earth signals. We characterize these signals, including body and surface wave arrivals from approximately 200 global earthquakes, using a 34-station broadband array spanning the Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica. Teleseismic earthquake arrivals are essential for constructing models of crustal and upper mantle structure, and observations on the ice shelf are key to resolving the structure of the underlying West Antarctic Rift System. To test the plausibility of passive imaging in this unique environment, we examine seasonal and spatial dependence of signal-to-noise ratios of body wave arrivals and the impact of ice shelf dynamics on surface wave dispersion. We also note unusual phase mechanics arising from the floating platform geometry.

2017 Rapid Retreat Of Thwaites Glacier

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Milillo, P.; Rignot, E. J.; Mouginot, J.; Scheuchl, B.

2017-12-01

We employ data from the second generation of SAR systems e.g. the Italian COSMO- SkyMed (CSK) constellation and the German TanDEM-X (TDX) formation to monitor grounding line retreat using short repeat-time interferometry and accurate InSAR DEM on Thwaites glacier in the Amundsen Sea Embayment (ASE), West Antarctica. The ASE is a marine-based ice sheet with a retrograde bed containing enough ice to raise global sea level by 120 cm. Several studies have inferred the mechanical properties of portions of ASE using observationally constrained numerical models, but these studies offer only temporal snapshots of basal mechanics owing to a dearth of observational time series. Prior attempts of grounding lines mapping have been limited because few space-borne SAR missions offer the short-term repeat pass capability required to map the differential vertical displacement of floating ice at tidal frequencies with sufficient detail to resolve grounding line boundaries in areas of fast ice deformation. Using 1-day CSK repeat pass data and TDX DEMs, we collected frequent, high-resolution grounding line measurements of Thwaites glaciers spanning 2015-2017. We compare the results with ERS data spanning 1996-2011, and Sentinel-1a 2014-2015 data. Between 2011 and 2017 we observe a maximum retreat of 5-7 km across the main Thwaites glacier tongue and Thwaites Eastern ice shelf (TEIS) corresponding to an increased retreat rate of 0.5 km/yr. Grounding line retreat has been fueled by the enhanced intrusion of warm, salty, subsurface ocean water of circumpolar deep water origin onto the continental shelf, beneath the floating ice shelf, to reach the glacier grounding zone and melt it from below at rates varying from 50 to 150 m/yr. The retreat rate varies depending on the magnitude of ice melt by the ocean, the rate of ice thinning and the shape of the glacier surface and bed topography.

A global, high-resolution data set of ice sheet topography, cavity geometry, and ocean bathymetry

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Schaffer, Janin; Timmermann, Ralph; Arndt, Jan Erik; Savstrup Kristensen, Steen; Mayer, Christoph; Morlighem, Mathieu; Steinhage, Daniel

2016-10-01

The ocean plays an important role in modulating the mass balance of the polar ice sheets by interacting with the ice shelves in Antarctica and with the marine-terminating outlet glaciers in Greenland. Given that the flux of warm water onto the continental shelf and into the sub-ice cavities is steered by complex bathymetry, a detailed topography data set is an essential ingredient for models that address ice-ocean interaction. We followed the spirit of the global RTopo-1 data set and compiled consistent maps of global ocean bathymetry, upper and lower ice surface topographies, and global surface height on a spherical grid with now 30 arcsec grid spacing. For this new data set, called RTopo-2, we used the General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans (GEBCO_2014) as the backbone and added the International Bathymetric Chart of the Arctic Ocean version 3 (IBCAOv3) and the International Bathymetric Chart of the Southern Ocean (IBCSO) version 1. While RTopo-1 primarily aimed at a good and consistent representation of the Antarctic ice sheet, ice shelves, and sub-ice cavities, RTopo-2 now also contains ice topographies of the Greenland ice sheet and outlet glaciers. In particular, we aimed at a good representation of the fjord and shelf bathymetry surrounding the Greenland continent. We modified data from earlier gridded products in the areas of Petermann Glacier, Hagen Bræ, and Sermilik Fjord, assuming that sub-ice and fjord bathymetries roughly follow plausible Last Glacial Maximum ice flow patterns. For the continental shelf off Northeast Greenland and the floating ice tongue of Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden Glacier at about 79° N, we incorporated a high-resolution digital bathymetry model considering original multibeam survey data for the region. Radar data for surface topographies of the floating ice tongues of Nioghalvfjerdsfjorden Glacier and Zachariæ Isstrøm have been obtained from the data centres of Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Operation Icebridge (NASA/NSF), and Alfred Wegener Institute (AWI). For the Antarctic ice sheet/ice shelves, RTopo-2 largely relies on the Bedmap-2 product but applies corrections for the geometry of Getz, Abbot, and Fimbul ice shelf cavities. The data set is available in full and in regional subsets in NetCDF format from the PANGAEA database at doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.856844.

Ocean Observations Below Petermann Gletscher Ice Shelf, Greenland From a Cabled Observatory

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Muenchow, A.; Nicholls, K. W.; Padman, L.; Washam, P.

2016-12-01

Petermann Gletscher in North Greenland features the second largest floating ice shelf by area in the northern hemisphere. In August of 2015 we drilled three holes through the ice shelf and deployed ocean sensors between 5 and 700 m below the glacier-ocean interface. The sensors are controlled by data loggers at the surface that also support a weather station and GPS. All data are transmitted near real-time via a satellite communication link that allowed data downloads and software uploads until February 2016. The system provided gap-free hourly data through the polar night with air temperatures dropping below -48 °C. Mean glacier speeds in winter (Nov.-Feb) were 1180±18 m/year; these values are 12±5% larger than previously reported winter speeds at this location. Hourly ocean observations revealed large bi-monthly pulses within 30 m of the glacier-ocean interface and amplitudes that exceed 1 °C in temperature and 1 psu in salinity. We posit that episodic discharge of glacial meltwater, modulated by the spring-neap tidal cycle thickens the boundary layer under the ice shelf at the location of our measurements. All data are posted at http://ows.udel.edu . A site visit is planned for August 2016 to fix communication failures, retrieve locally stored data, add sensors, and evaluate sustainability of this first cabled observatory on a floating and rapidly melting Greenland glacier.

Sea-level response to ice sheet evolution: An ocean perspective

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Jacobs, Stanley S.

1991-01-01

The ocean's influence upon and response to Antarctic ice sheet changes is considered in relation to sea level rise over recent and future decades. Assuming present day ice fronts are in approximate equilibrium, a preliminary budget for the ice sheet is estimated from accumulation vs. iceberg calving and the basal melting that occurs beneath floating ice shelves. Iceberg calving is derived from the volume of large bergs identified and tracked by the Navy/NOAA Joint Ice Center and from shipboard observations. Basal melting exceeds 600 cu km/yr and is concentrated near the ice fronts and ice shelf grounding lines. An apparent negative mass balance for the Antarctic ice sheet may result from an anomalous calving rate during the past decade, but there are large uncertainties associated with all components of the ice budget. The results from general circulation models are noted in the context of projected precipitation increases and ocean temperature changes on and near the continent. An ocean research program that could help refine budget estimates is consistent with goals of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Initiative.

West Antarctic Ice Sheet retreat driven by Holocene warm water incursions

PubMed Central

Hillenbrand, Claus-Dieter; Smith, James A.; Hodell, David A.; Greaves, Mervyn; Poole, Christopher R.; Kender, Sev; Williams, Mark; Andersen, Thorbjørn Joest; Jernas, Patrycja E.; Klages, Johann P.; Roberts, Stephen J.; Gohl, Karsten; Larter, Robert D.; Kuhn, Gerhard

2017-01-01

Glaciological and oceanographic observations coupled with numerical models show that warm Circumpolar Deep Water (CDW) upwelling onto the West Antarctic continental shelf causes melting of the undersides of floating ice shelves. Because these ice shelves buttress glaciers feeding into them, their ocean-induced thinning is driving Antarctic ice-sheet loss today. Here we present the first multi-proxy data based reconstruction of variability in CDW inflow to the Amundsen Sea sector, the most vulnerable part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, during the last 11,000 years. The chemical composition of foraminifer shells and benthic foraminifer assemblages in marine sediments indicate that enhanced CDW upwelling, controlled by the latitudinal position of the Southern Hemisphere westerly winds, forced deglaciation of this sector both until 7,500 years ago, when an ice-shelf collapse may have caused rapid ice-sheet thinning further upstream, and since the 1940s. These results increase confidence in the predictive capability of current ice-sheet models. PMID:28682333

West Antarctic Ice Sheet retreat driven by Holocene warm water incursions.

PubMed

Hillenbrand, Claus-Dieter; Smith, James A; Hodell, David A; Greaves, Mervyn; Poole, Christopher R; Kender, Sev; Williams, Mark; Andersen, Thorbjørn Joest; Jernas, Patrycja E; Elderfield, Henry; Klages, Johann P; Roberts, Stephen J; Gohl, Karsten; Larter, Robert D; Kuhn, Gerhard

2017-07-05

Glaciological and oceanographic observations coupled with numerical models show that warm Circumpolar Deep Water (CDW) incursions onto the West Antarctic continental shelf cause melting of the undersides of floating ice shelves. Because these ice shelves buttress glaciers feeding into them, their ocean-induced thinning is driving Antarctic ice-sheet retreat today. Here we present a multi-proxy data based reconstruction of variability in CDW inflow to the Amundsen Sea sector, the most vulnerable part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, during the Holocene epoch (from 11.7 thousand years ago to the present). The chemical compositions of foraminifer shells and benthic foraminifer assemblages in marine sediments indicate that enhanced CDW upwelling, controlled by the latitudinal position of the Southern Hemisphere westerly winds, forced deglaciation of this sector from at least 10,400 years ago until 7,500 years ago-when an ice-shelf collapse may have caused rapid ice-sheet thinning further upstream-and since the 1940s. These results increase confidence in the predictive capability of current ice-sheet models.

Antarctic Ice Shelf Loss Comes From Underneath

NASA Image and Video Library

2017-12-08

Calving front of an ice shelf in West Antarctica. The traditional view on ice shelves, the floating extensions of seaward glaciers, has been that they mostly lose ice by shedding icebergs. A new study by NASA and university researchers has found that warm ocean waters melting the ice sheets from underneath account for 55 percent of all ice shelf mass loss in Antarctica. This image was taken during the 2012 Antarctic campaign of NASA's Operation IceBridge, a mission that provided data for the new ice shelf study. Read more: www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/earth20130613.html Credit: NASA/GSFC/Jefferson Beck NASA image use policy. NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA’s mission through four scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a leading role in NASA’s accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific knowledge to advance the Agency’s mission. Follow us on Twitter Like us on Facebook Find us on Instagram

Hinge-line Migration of Petermann Gletscher, North Greenland, Detected Using Satellite Radar Interferometry

NASA Technical Reports Server (NTRS)

Rignot, Eric

1998-01-01

The synthetic-aperture radar interferometry technique is used to detect the migration of the limit of tidal flexing, or hinge line, of the floating ice tongue of Petermann Gletscher, a major outlet glacier of north Greenland.

Ice911 Research: Preserving and Rebuilding Multi-Year Ice

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Field, L. A.; Chetty, S.; Manzara, A.

2013-12-01

A localized surface albedo modification technique is being developed that shows promise as a method to increase multi-year ice using reflective floating materials, chosen so as to have low subsidiary environmental impact. Multi-year ice has diminished rapidly in the Arctic over the past 3 decades (Riihela et al, Nature Climate Change, August 4, 2013) and this plays a part in the continuing rapid decrease of summer-time ice. As summer-time ice disappears, the Arctic is losing its ability to act as the earth's refrigeration system, and this has widespread climatic effects, as well as a direct effect on sea level rise, as oceans heat, and once-land-based ice melts into the sea. We have tested the albedo modification technique on a small scale over five Winter/Spring seasons at sites including California's Sierra Nevada Mountains, a Canadian lake, and a small man-made lake in Minnesota, using various materials and an evolving array of instrumentation. The materials can float and can be made to minimize effects on marine habitat and species. The instrumentation is designed to be deployed in harsh and remote locations. Localized snow and ice preservation, and reductions in water heating, have been quantified in small-scale testing. Climate modeling is underway to analyze the effects of this method of surface albedo modification in key areas on the rate of oceanic and atmospheric temperature rise. We are also evaluating the effects of snow and ice preservation for protection of infrastructure and habitat stabilization. This paper will also discuss a possible reduction of sea level rise with an eye to quantification of cost/benefit. The most recent season's experimentation on a man-made private lake in Minnesota saw further evolution in the material and deployment approach. The materials were successfully deployed to shield underlying snow and ice from melting; applications of granular materials remained stable in the face of local wind and storms. Localized albedo modification options such as the one being studied in this work may act to preserve ice, glaciers, permafrost and seasonal snow areas, and perhaps aid natural ice formation processes. If this method could be deployed on a large enough scale, it could conceivably bring about a reduction in the Ice-Albedo Feedback Effect, possibly slowing one of the key effects and factors in climate change. Test site at man-made lake in Minnesota 2013

The safety band of Antarctic ice shelves

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Fürst, Johannes Jakob; Durand, Gaël; Gillet-Chaulet, Fabien; Tavard, Laure; Rankl, Melanie; Braun, Matthias; Gagliardini, Olivier

2016-05-01

The floating ice shelves along the seaboard of the Antarctic ice sheet restrain the outflow of upstream grounded ice. Removal of these ice shelves, as shown by past ice-shelf recession and break-up, accelerates the outflow, which adds to sea-level rise. A key question in predicting future outflow is to quantify the extent of calving that might precondition other dynamic consequences and lead to loss of ice-shelf restraint. Here we delineate frontal areas that we label as `passive shelf ice’ and that can be removed without major dynamic implications, with contrasting results across the continent. The ice shelves in the Amundsen and Bellingshausen seas have limited or almost no `passive’ portion, which implies that further retreat of current ice-shelf fronts will yield important dynamic consequences. This region is particularly vulnerable as ice shelves have been thinning at high rates for two decades and as upstream grounded ice rests on a backward sloping bed, a precondition to marine ice-sheet instability. In contrast to these ice shelves, Larsen C Ice Shelf, in the Weddell Sea, exhibits a large `passive’ frontal area, suggesting that the imminent calving of a vast tabular iceberg will be unlikely to instantly produce much dynamic change.

Effects of Instructional Support within Constructivist Learning Environments for Elementary School Students' Understanding of "Floating and Sinking"

ERIC Educational Resources Information Center

Hardy, Ilonca; Jonen, Angela; Moller, Komelia; Stern, Elsbeth

2006-01-01

In a repeated measures design (pretest, posttest, 1-year follow-up) with 161 3rd-grade students, the authors compared 2 curricula on floating and sinking within constructivist learning environments, varying in instructional support. The 2 curricula differed in the sequencing of content and the teacher's cognitively structuring statements. At the…

Ice shelf breaking and increase velocity of glacier: the view from analogue experiment

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Corti, Giacomo; Iandelli, Irene

2013-04-01

Collapse of the Larsen II platform during the late 90s has generated an increase in velocity if ice sheet discharge, highlighting that these processes may strongly destabilize large ice masses speeding up the plateau discharge toward the sea. Parameters such as ice thickness, valley width and slope, ice pack dimensions may contribute to modulate the effect of increase in ice flow velocity following the removal of ice. We analyze this process through scale analogue models, aimed at reproducing the flow of ice from a plateau into the sea through a narrow valley. The ice is reproduced with a transparent silicone (Polydimethisiloxane), flowing at velocities of a few centimeters per hour and simulating natural velocities in the range of a few meters per year. Having almost the same density of the ice, PDMS floats on water and simulate the ice-shelf formation. Results of preliminary experimental series support that this methodology is able to reasonably reproduce the process and support a significant increase in velocity discharge following the removal of ice pack. Additional tests are designed to verify the influence of the above-mentioned parameters on the increase in ice velocity.

Deep Space Detection of Oriented Ice Crystals

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Marshak, A.; Varnai, T.; Kostinski, A. B.

2017-12-01

The deep space climate observatory (DSCOVR) spacecraft resides at the first Lagrangian point about one million miles from Earth. A polychromatic imaging camera onboard delivers nearly hourly observations of the entire sun-lit face of the Earth. Many images contain unexpected bright flashes of light over both ocean and land. We constructed a yearlong time series of flash latitudes, scattering angles and oxygen absorption to demonstrate conclusively that the flashes over land are specular reflections off tiny ice crystals floating in the air nearly horizontally. Such deep space detection of tropospheric ice can be used to constrain the likelihood of oriented crystals and their contribution to Earth albedo.

Extension of NHWAVE to Couple LAMMPS for Modeling Wave Interactions with Arctic Ice Floes

DTIC Science & Technology

2015-09-30

Modelling, in press. Orzech, M., Shi, F., Veeramony, J., Bateman , S., Calantoni, J., and Kirby, J. T., 2015, “Incorporating floating surface...objects into a fully dispersive surface wave model”, Ocean Modelling, submitted. Bateman , S. Shi, F., Orzech, M., Veeramony, J., and Calantoni, J., 2014...Orzech, M., Shi, F., Calantoni, J., Bateman , S., and Veeramony, J., “Small-scale modeling of waves and floes in the Marginal Ice Zone”, 2014 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

A note on the evolution equations from the area fraction and the thickness of a floating ice cover

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Schulkes, R. M. S. M.

1995-03-01

In this paper, two sets of evolution equations for the area fraction and the ice thickness are investigated. First of all, a simplified alternative derivation of the evolution equations as presented by Gray and Morland (1994) is given. In addition, it is shown that with proper identification of ridging functions, there is a close connection between the derived equations and the thickness distribution model introduced by Thorndike et al. (1975).

Implementing SPRINTT [Student Polar Research with IPY National(and International)Teacher Training] in 5th Grade Science

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Glass, D. S.

2009-12-01

I implemented the new NSF-funded SPRINTT (Student Polar Research with IPY National (and International) Teacher Training) curriculum with a 5th grade science class. SPRINTT, developed at U.S. Satellite Laboratory, Inc., is a 5-8 week science program teaching 5th through 10th graders to investigate climate change using polar data. The program includes perspectives of both Western scientists and the indigenous Northern population. The course contains three phases: Phase 1 includes content, data interpretation, and hands-on experiments to study Frozen Water, Frozen Land, and Food; Phase 2 (optional) includes further content on specific polar topics; and Phase 3 is a scaffolded research investigation. Before the course, teachers were trained via live webinars. This curriculum capitalizes on children’s innate fascination with our planet’s final frontier and combines it with the politically and scientifically relevant topic of climate change. In 2009, I used SPRINTT with 23 heterogeneous fifth grade students at National Presbyterian School in Washington DC for an environmental science unit. Overall, it was a success. The students met most of the learning objectives and showed enthusiasm for the material. I share my experiences to help other educators and curriculum developers. The Phase 1 course includes earth science (glaciers, sea ice, weather and climate, greenhouse gases, seasons, and human impacts on environments), life science (needs of living things, food and energy transfer, adaptations, and ecosystems and biomes) and physical science (phases of matter). Tailoring the program, I focused on Phase 1, the most accessible material and content, while deemphasizing the more cumbersome Phase 3 online research project. Pre-assessments documented the students’ misconceptions and informed instruction. The investigations were appropriately educational and interesting. For example, students enjoyed looking at environmental factors and their impact on the people in the tale of “Mr. Gambell’s First Winter.” However, some of the online lessons and video clips were boring or presented technical difficulties. Otherwise, the lessons were paced appropriately, followed a coherent progression, and were sensibly organized into the themes of Frozen Water, Frozen Land, and Food. The three hands-on experiments in Phase 1 (melting ice, permafrost model, and looking at food’s origins) were effective. For example, when comparing ice blocks floating in water (sea ice model) or sitting on a rock above water (glacial ice model), students were eager to describe the shape of each block and competed to guess which ice would melt fastest. They took good notes on the procedure, documented their results and summarized a reasonable conclusion. These activities enlivened the curriculum and taught important lessons about experimental design, data collection, models, and classification. Using traditional knowledge as a formal tool for science is another intriguing component of the SPRINTT program. During Phase 3, the research investigation, students collaborated on a series of online authentic research activities (choosing from several high-interest options) then summarized their findings in a web-based formal report. I share the challenges and successes of using SPRINTT.

First Observation of Rock Motion on Racetrack Playa, Death Valley National Park—Role of a Persistent Pool, Sun, Zephyrs, Windowpane Ice, and Tugboats

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Norris, R. D.; Norris, J. M.

2014-12-01

Trails in the mud-cracked surface of Racetrack Playa have been scored by hundreds of rocks up to 320 kg, but the mechanism of movement is debated. In Winter 2013-2014, we observed rocks in motion associated with a transient pool formed by winter precipitation. The pond was 7 cm deep on the southern edge of the playa, tapering to a mud flat to the north. Freezing during cold winter nights formed floating "windowpane" ice 3-5 mm thick. Rocks repeatedly moved on sunny days under light winds of 3-5 m/second, as the ice broke up near midday and was set into motion by wind stress on melt pools and the ice surface. Ice panels shoved rocks along the mud like a tugboat, sometimes forming moving imbricated ice piles upstream of the rocks and in other cases moving faster than the rocks and forming brash-filled leads downstream. GPS units mounted in experimental rocks recorded a creeping pace of 2-6 m/minute, a speed that made it difficult to observe trail formation visually. The 2013-2014 pond formed on November 20-24 and persisted through early February 2014. During this time rocks were observed moving at least five times, and studies of "stiz marks" formed by rocks at the ends of trail segments show that there were likely 3-5 additional move events. Observed travel times ranged from a few seconds to 16 minutes. In one event, two experimental rocks 153 m apart began moving simultaneously and traveled 64.1 and 65.6 m respectively, ultimately moving 157-162 m in subsequent events. Rock motion depends on the creation of winter pools sufficiently deep to allow the formation of floating ice and exposed to the light winds and sun needed for ice breakup. The combination of these events is extremely rare, leading to highly episodic trail formation. Our observations differ from previous hypotheses in that the rocks were moved by thinner ice, at slower speeds, and by lighter winds than predicted.

Simulating Ice-Flow and Calving on Store Glacier, West Greenland, with a 3D Full Stokes Model

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Todd, J.; Christoffersen, P.; Zwinger, T.; Luckman, A. J.; Benn, D.

2015-12-01

The mass balance and long-term stability of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica depend heavily on the dynamics of their ice-ocean margins. Iceberg calving accounts for the majority of the net annual loss of ice in Antarctica and around half of that from Greenland. Furthermore, climate driven changes to dynamics at these calving margins can be transmitted far inland. Thus, predicting future sea level contribution from the cryosphere requires an improved understanding of calving, and the processes which link it to climate and ice-sheet flow. We present results from a new 3D calving model coupled to a full-Stokes, time evolving glacier dynamic model, implemented for Store Glacier, a 5-km-wide calving glacier in the Uummannaq region of West Greenland, which flows at a rate of 20 m/day at its terminus. The model is developed using the open source finite element package Elmer/Ice, with the criterion that calving occurs when surface and basal crevasses meet. Crevasses open in response to tensile stresses near the terminus and water pressure at the bed. When the model was applied in 2D for the central flowline of Store Glacier, we found that basal topography exerts overarching control on the long term position of the calving front, while ice mélange buttressing allows the seasonal extension of a floating tongue, which collapses in early summer. New results emerging from implementation of calving in a 3D model indicate significant spatial heterogeneity in calving dynamics because the northern half of the terminus is grounded whereas the southern half is floating. This contrasting setting affects calving dynamics, further underlining the importance of geometry and basal topography, and suggesting that lower dimensional calving models may miss important aspects of calving dynamics. Our results also suggest that implementing grounding line dynamics is important for modelling calving, even for glaciers which are, for the most part, firmly grounded.

Interactions of the Greenland Petermann Glacier with the ocean: An initial perspective (Invited)

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Falkner, K. K.; Johnson, H. L.; Melling, H.; Muenchow, A.; Samelson, R. M.; Friends Of Petermann

2010-12-01

Petermann Glacier is major outlet glacier that drains 6% of the area of the Greenland Ice Sheet in western North Greenland. It is one of four major outlet glaciers on Greenland with a grounding line substantially below sea level (about 500m) and one of two such glaciers to retain a substantial floating tongue. The floating ice tongue of Petermann glacier is thought to lose at least 80% of its mass through ocean interaction. Based on three opportunistic ocean surveys in Petermann Fjord, we present an overview of circulation at the fjord mouth, hydrographic structure beneath the ice tongue, oceanic heat delivered to the under-ice cavity and the fate of the resulting melt water. We also present an historical perspective on the August 2010 major calving event. The 1100m-deep fjord is separated from neighboring Hall Basin by a sill that is inferred to lie between 350m and 450m deep. Hall Basin is a section of Nares Strait that connects the Arctic Ocean (at the Lincoln Sea proceeding southward through Robeson Channel, Hall Basin, Kennedy Channel, Kane Basin and Smith Sound) to Baffin Bay. Sills in the Lincoln Sea (290m) and in Kane Basin (220m) restrict communication with the Arctic Ocean and Baffin Bay. The net flux of seawater through Nares Strait is southward and relatively fresh, conditioned by sources and processes within the Arctic Ocean and locally. Within Petermann Fjord, glacial melt water appears on the northeast side at 200-600m. A cyclonic gyre occurs within the fjord mouth, with outflow on the northeast side. Oceanic heat fluxes into the fjord are sufficient to account for the observed rate of basal melting. Cold, low salinity water intrudes far under the ice and likely limits basal melting to the inland half of the tongue. The recent major calving event resulted in a loss of 300 km2 or about 20% of the total area of the floating tongue, most of which remained intact as an ice island that garnered much media attention. Available observations show calving to be sporadic on a decadal timescale. Multiple factors likely contribute to calving events. These include the geometry of the fjord, absence of sea ice, preconditioning of the glacier by crevassing and melt related cracking and occurrence of strong katabatic or orographically channeled winds. The recent event falls within the realm of previously documented calving rates but the remaining tongue length is the shortest ever directly observed. Gaps in the 134 year record preclude final judgment about whether the recent calving is entirely unprecedented. Rising surface temperature trends and changed sea ice and ocean circulation patterns in the Arctic could render the tongue susceptible to collapse. As this could contribute to accelerated ice mass flux from Greenland, it is important to continue to observe and clarify processes operative in this system.

Annual nitrate drawdown observed by SOCCOM profiling floats and the relationship to annual net community production

NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS)

Johnson, Kenneth S.; Plant, Joshua N.; Dunne, John P.; Talley, Lynne D.; Sarmiento, Jorge L.

2017-08-01

Annual nitrate cycles have been measured throughout the pelagic waters of the Southern Ocean, including regions with seasonal ice cover and southern hemisphere subtropical zones. Vertically resolved nitrate measurements were made using in situ ultraviolet spectrophotometer (ISUS) and submersible ultraviolet nitrate analyzer (SUNA) optical nitrate sensors deployed on profiling floats. Thirty-one floats returned 40 complete annual cycles. The mean nitrate profile from the month with the highest winter nitrate minus the mean profile from the month with the lowest nitrate yields the annual nitrate drawdown. This quantity was integrated to 200 m depth and converted to carbon using the Redfield ratio to estimate annual net community production (ANCP) throughout the Southern Ocean south of 30°S. A well-defined, zonal mean distribution is found with highest values (3-4 mol C m-2 yr-1) from 40 to 50°S. Lowest values are found in the subtropics and in the seasonal ice zone. The area weighted mean was 2.9 mol C m-2 yr-1 for all regions south of 40°S. Cumulative ANCP south of 50°S is 1.3 Pg C yr-1. This represents about 13% of global ANCP in about 14% of the global ocean area.