Related papers: Groundwater feedbacks on ice sheets and subglacial…
Sedimentary basins beneath many Antarctic ice streams host substantial volumes of groundwater, which can be exchanged with a "shallow" subglacial hydrological system of till and channelised water. This exchange contributes substantially to…
Many fast-flowing glaciers and ice streams move over beds consisting of reworked sediments and erosional products, commonly referred to as till. The complex interplay between ice, meltwater, and till at the subglacial bed connects several…
Ice streams are bands of fast-flowing ice in ice sheets. We investigate their formation as an example of spontaneous pattern formation, based on positive feedbacks between dissipation and basal sliding. Our focus is on temperature-dependent…
Glacier and ice-sheet motion is fundamental to glaciology. However, we still lack a consensus for the optimal way to relate basal velocity to basal traction for large-scale glacier and ice-sheet models (the 'sliding relationship').…
Observations have long associated ice streams with the presence of meltwater at the bed. More recently, theoretical models have been able to reproduce ice-stream behaviour as a consequence of the coupled dynamics of ice and subglacial…
The future behavior of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) may have a major impact on future climate. For instance, ice sheet melt may contribute significantly to global sea level rise. Understanding the current state of WAIS is therefore…
Trapped beneath the Antarctic ice sheet lie over 400 subglacial lakes, which are considered to be extreme, isolated, yet viable habitats for microbial life. The physical conditions within subglacial lakes are critical to evaluating how and…
Supraglacial lakes play a central role in storing melt water, enhancing surface melt, and ultimately in driving ice flow and ice shelf melt through injecting water into the subglacial environment and facilitating fracturing. Here, we…
Ice-infiltrated sediment, known as a frozen fringe, leads to phenomena such as frost heave, ice lenses, and meters of debris-rich ice under glaciers. Understanding the dynamics of frozen fringe development is important as frost heave is…
Drainage of supraglacial lakes to the ice-sheet bed can occur when a hydrofracture propagates downward, driven by the weight of the water in the lake. For supraglacial lakes in the grounding zones of Antarctic glaciers, the mechanics of…
Tipping elements in the climate system are large-scale subregions of the Earth that might possess threshold behavior under global warming with large potential impacts on human societies. Here, we study a subset of five tipping elements and…
Subglacial blisters form due to the rapid drainage of supraglacial lakes into grounded ice sheets, and are characterised by elastic ice uplift and transient ice-velocity anomalies. Although blister occurrence is confirmed by observations,…
Sublimation of drifting snow, which is significant for the balances of mass and energy of the polar ice sheet, is a complex physical process with intercoupling between ice crystals, wind field, temperature, and moisture. Here a…
Mechanical and sliding instabilities are the two processes which may lead to breaking off events of large ice masses. Mechanical instabilities mainly affect unbalanced cold hanging glaciers. For the latter case, a prediction could be…
Simulations of the Greenland Ice Sheet are carried out with a high-resolution version of the ice-sheet model SICOPOLIS for several global-warming scenarios for the period 1990-2350. In particular, the impact of surface-meltwater-induced…
When particles settle through a stable temperature or salinity gradient they can drive an instability known as sedimentary fingering convection. This phenomenon is thought to occur beneath sediment-rich river plumes in lakes and oceans, in…
The ice shelves buttressing the Antarctic ice sheet determine the rate of ice-discharge into the surrounding oceans. The geometry of ice shelves, and hence their buttressing strength, is determined by ice flow as well as by the local…
Surface meltwater from glaciers and ice sheets contributes significantly to sea-level rise, yet the processes governing its transport and retention within cold firn remain poorly constrained, particularly in multiple dimensions. Here we…
The field of ice sheet, ice shelf and glacier-related seismology, cryoseismology, has seen rapid development in recent years. As concern grows for the implications of change in the great ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, so instrument…
Full thickness crevasses can transport water from the glacier surface to the bedrock where high water pressures can open kilometre-long cracks along the basal interface, which can accelerate glacier flow. We present a first computational…