EGU21-7758, updated on 08 Aug 2023
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-7758
EGU General Assembly 2021
© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

On the relation between ice thickness changes and glacier speed-up, with application to Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica

Jan De Rydt1, Ronja Reese2, Fernando Paolo3, and G Hilmar Gudmundsson1
Jan De Rydt et al.
  • 1Department of Geography and Environmental Sciences, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
  • 2Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Member of the Leibniz Association, Potsdam, Germany
  • 3Formerly at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, USA

Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica is among the fastest changing glaciers worldwide. Much of its fast-flowing central trunk is thinning and accelerating, a process thought to have been triggered by ocean-induced changes in ice-shelf buttressing. The measured acceleration in response to perturbations in ice thickness is a non-trivial manifestation of several poorly-understood physical processes, including the transmission of stresses between the ice and underlying bed. To enable robust projections of future ice flow, it is imperative that numerical models include an accurate representation of these processes. Here we combine the latest data with analytical and numerical solutions of SSA ice flow to show that the recent increase in flow speed of Pine Island Glacier is only compatible with observed patterns of thinning if a spatially distributed, predominantly plastic bed underlies large parts of the central glacier and its upstream tributaries.

How to cite: De Rydt, J., Reese, R., Paolo, F., and Gudmundsson, G. H.: On the relation between ice thickness changes and glacier speed-up, with application to Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica, EGU General Assembly 2021, online, 19–30 Apr 2021, EGU21-7758, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu21-7758, 2021.

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