Improved monitoring of subglacial lake activity in Greenland
- 1Geodesy and Earth Observation, DTU Space, Technical University of Denmark,Kgs. Lyngby, DENMARK
- 2Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, Copenhagen, DENMARK
- 3Centre for Polar Observation & Modelling, Centre for Excellence in Environmental Data Science, Lancaster University,Lancaster, UNITED KINGDOM
- 4Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, Lancaster, UNITED KINGDOM
- 5School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UNITED KINGDOM
- 6EarthWave Ltd., Edinburgh, UNITED KINGDOM
- 7German Aerospace Center (DLR), German Remote Data Center (DFD), Wessling, GERMANY
Subglacial lakes may form beneath ice sheets and ice caps, given the availability of water and appropriate bedrock and surface topography to capture the water. On a regional scale, these lakes can modulate the freshwater output to the ocean by acting as reservoirs that may periodically drain and recharge. Several such active subglacial lakes have been documented under the Antarctic ice sheet, while only a few are observed under the Greenland ice sheet. The small size of the hydrologically active subglacial lakes in Greenland compared to those in Antarctica, puts additional demands on our mapping capabilities to resolve in great detail the evolving surface topography over these lakes to document their temporal behavior. Here, we explore the potential of combining CryoSat-2 swath data and high resolution DEMs generated from TanDEM-X scenes and ArcticDEM strips to improve our knowledge of the evolution of four active subglacial lake sites previously documented in the literature. We find that the DEM data complement each other well in terms of time and resolution and thus provide new information about the subglacial lake activity, though the small size of the collapse basins is challenging for CS2, and we are only able to derive useful CS2 data for the two largest of the four investigated lakes. Based on these data sets we can e.g. conclude that the collapse basin at Flade Isblink was actually as deep as 95 m when it formed, which is 30 m deeper than previously documented. We also present evidence of a new active subglacial lake in Southwest Greenland.
How to cite: Bahbah Nielsen, R., Sandberg Sørensen, L., Bjerregaard Simonsen, S., Havelund Andersen, N., Munck Solgaard, A., Bjørnholt Karlsson, N., Bowling, J., Leeson, A., Maddalena, J., McMillan, M., Gourmelen, N., Horton, A., and Wessel, B.: Improved monitoring of subglacial lake activity in Greenland, EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-7222, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-7222, 2022.