Folded ice in the upper North East Greenland Ice Stream reveal timing of the onset of streaming
- 1Alfred-Wegener-Institut Helmholtz-Zentrum für Polar- und Meeresforschung, Glaciology, Bremerhaven, Germany (daniela.jansen@awi.de)
- 2Department of Geosciences, Tübingen University, Tübingen, Germany
- 3Now at ATLAS ELEKTRONIK GmbH, Bremen
- 4Niels Bohr Institute, Physics of Ice, Climate and Earth, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
- 5Center for Earth Observation Sciences, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada
- 6Now at Laboratoire de Géologie de Lyon: Terre, Planètes, Environnement (LGL-TPE), ENS Lyon, Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1, CNRS, Villeurbanne, France
- 7University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany
- 8College of Earth Science, Chengdu University of Technology, Chengdu, China
- 9Geoscience Centre, University of Göttingen, Germany
- 10GEO3BCN, CSIC, Lluís Solé Sabarís s/n, 08028 Barcelona
- 11Center for Remote Sensing and Integrated Systems (CReSIS), University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA
- 12Now at Department of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics, Ca’Foscari University Venice, Italy
- 13School of Earth Science and Resources, China University of Geosciences (Beijing), Beijing, China
Only a few localised ice streams drain most ice from the Greenland Ice Sheet. Thus, understanding ice stream behaviour and their temporal variability is crucially important to predict future sea-level change. The interior trunk of the 700 km-long North-East Greenland Ice Stream (NEGIS) is remarkable for the lack of any clear bedrock channel to explain its presence. Here we use isochronous radar reflections from an airborne radar survey as passive tracers of ice deformation. We present the first-ever 3-dimensional analysis of folding and advection of stratigraphic horizons within an ice stream, which shows that the localised flow and shear margins in the upstream part were fully developed only ca. 2000 years ago. This indicates that this type of streaming in the interior of an ice sheet can be triggered on short time scales.
How to cite: Jansen, D., Franke, S., Bauer, C., Binder, T., Dahl-Jensen, D., Eichler, J., Eisen, O., Hu, Y., Kerch, J., Llorens, M. G., Miller, H., Neckel, N., Paden, J., de Riese, T., Sachau, T., Stoll, N., Weikusat, I., Wilhelms, F., Zhang, Y., and Bons, P. D.: Folded ice in the upper North East Greenland Ice Stream reveal timing of the onset of streaming, EGU General Assembly 2024, Vienna, Austria, 14–19 Apr 2024, EGU24-18028, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu24-18028, 2024.
