Circum-Antarctic seasonality in grounded ice flow

Recent advances in high-temporal-resolution satellite imaging has revealed the occurrence of seasonal ice-flow variability in the Antarctic Peninsula for the first time. This newly documented phenomenon provides motivation for identifying the as-yet-unknown ice, ocean and climate interactions responsible for driving the seasonal signals observed across the Antarctic Peninsula, and raises important questions about the possible presence and drivers of seasonality elsewhere in Antarctica. Knowledge of such mechanisms and the extent of seasonality around Antarctica will be important for refining discharge-based ice-sheet mass balance estimations, and for improving predictions of Antarctica’s future response to climate change.

Here, we identify the likely drivers of the recently observed ice-flow seasonality in the western Antarctic Peninsula by carrying out statistical time series analysis using our published Sentinel-1-derived velocity observations (Boxall et al., 2022; doi:10.5194/tc-16-3907-2022) and an array of environmental variables. Our results reveal that both surface and oceanic forcing are statistically significant controls upon ice-flow seasonality in the western Antarctic Peninsula, although each mechanism elicits a unique lag between forcing and the ice-velocity response.

By upscaling our Sentinel-1-derived velocity observations, we also report upon the nature of ice-flow seasonality along Antarctica’s entire coastal margin for the first time and, through additional time series analysis, assess the glacier- to regional-scale importance of surface and ocean forcing upon circum-Antarctic rates of flow.