Preprints
Filtering by Subject: Glaciology
Three times accelerated glacier area loss in Svalbard revealed by deep learning
Published: 2025-03-22
Subjects: Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Computer Sciences, Earth Sciences, Glaciology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The rapid warming in polar regions highlights the need to monitor climate change impacts such as glacier retreat and related global sea level rise. Glacier area is an essential climate variable but its tracking is complicated by the labour-intensive manual digitisation of satellite imagery. Here we introduce ICEmapper, a deep learning model that maps glacier outlines from Sentinel-1 time series [...]
Ediacaran coupling of climate and biosphere dynamics
Published: 2025-03-14
Subjects: Climate, Glaciology, Paleontology, Sedimentology, Stratigraphy
Throughout the Phanerozoic (538.8 Ma to present), climate change is demonstrably linked to radiations, extinctions, and turnovers in the biosphere. Here, we show that this connection existed in the late Ediacaran (~579 to 538.8 Ma), the first interval in Earth’s history to host complex macro-organisms, including early metazoans. Current correlations of glacial sedimentary deposits have been used [...]
Fracturing during freezing in salty ice: preliminary analysis using a low-cost model system
Published: 2025-03-08
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Glaciology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The fracture properties of saline water ice play an important role in governing the mechanical behavior of sea ice, marine ice sheets, and icy planetary bodies. Here, we design a low-cost experimental system based on a simple observation: fractures form when freshwater is frozen in a plastic bag, but do not form when a small amount of NaCl salt (several g/L) is added before freezing. We [...]
Challenges and Opportunities in Cryosphere in the Hindu Kush Himalaya
Published: 2025-03-04
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geophysics and Seismology, Glaciology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The Hindu Kush Himalaya cryosphere faces critical challenges from climate change, including rapid glacier melt and reduced snow cover. These changes threaten water resources, ecosystems, and livelihoods across the region. However, opportunities emerge through advanced monitoring technologies and increased scientific understanding. Improved remote sensing and field observations allow better [...]
Subtemperate sliding reduces period of ice stream variability in a simple model
Published: 2025-02-06
Subjects: Glaciology, Non-linear Dynamics
Understanding the formation and evolution of fast flowing ice streams is essential to projecting the centennial-scale response of ice sheets to climate forcings. Slow flowing glaciers or stagnant ice streams can slide at low velocities over a bed that is below the bulk melting point of ice, dissipating small amounts of frictional heat. This phenomenon is typically referred to as subtemperate [...]
Model weighting for ISMIP6-Greenland based on observations and similarity among models
Published: 2025-01-23
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Geology, Glaciology
The Ice Sheet Model Intercomparison Project for CMIP6 (ISMIP6) resulted in a large number of ice sheet simulations from multiple ice sheet models. To-date, there are no model weighting studies that analyze or quantify the model performance and possible duplication of the ISMIP6 ice sheet models and the resulting effect on projections of mass loss. In this study, we adopt a model weighting scheme [...]
Simulating Seasonal Evolution of Subglacial Hydrology at a Surging Glacier in the Karakoram
Published: 2025-01-22
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Glaciology
Glacier motion, retreat, and glacier hazards such as surges and glacial lake outburst floods (GLOFs) are likely underpinned by subglacial hydrology. Recent advances in subglacial hydrological modeling allow us to shed light on subglacial processes that lead to changes in ice mass balance and GLOFs in High Mountain Asia (HMA). We present the first application of the SHAKTI subglacial hydrology [...]
L-Band Radiometric Measurement of Liquid Water in Greenland's Firn: Comparative Analysis with In Situ Measurements and Modeling
Published: 2024-12-31
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Glaciology
The addition and refreezing of liquid water to Greenland's accumulation area are increasingly important processes for assessing the ice sheet’s present and future mass balance, but uncertain initial conditions, complex infiltration physics, and limited field data pose challenges. Satellite-based L-band radiometry offers a promising new tool for observing liquid water in the firn layer, although [...]
Emulator-based Bayesian calibration of a subglacial drainage model
Published: 2024-12-25
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Glaciology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Subglacial drainage models, often motivated by the relationship between hydrology and ice flow, sensitively depend on numerous unconstrained parameters. We explore using borehole water-pressure timeseries to calibrate the uncertain parameters of a popular subglacial drainage model, taking a Bayesian perspective to quantify the uncertainty in parameter estimates and in the calibrated model [...]
Glacier preservation doubled by limiting warming to 1.5°C
Published: 2024-12-15
Subjects: Climate, Earth Sciences, Environmental Sciences, Glaciology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
Glaciers adapt slowly to changing climatic conditions, resulting in long-term changes in their mass with implications for sea level rise and water supply, even if the climate were to stabilize. Using eight glacier evolution models, we simulate global glacier evolution over multi-centennial timescales, allowing glaciers to equilibrate with climate under various constant global temperature [...]
Modelling glacier mass balance and runoff in the Kaskawulsh River headwaters of southwest Yukon, Canada, 1980-2022
Published: 2024-11-30
Subjects: Glaciology, Hydrology
The highly-glacierized headwaters of the Kaskawulsh River are home to 9% of all glacier ice in Yukon, Canada, have been losing glacier mass at regionally representative rates, and were the source of a sudden meltwater-rerouting event in 2016 that has had significant downstream consequences. We use an enhanced temperature-index melt model driven by downscaled and bias-corrected climate reanalysis [...]
Investigating snow sinks on level sea ice: A case study in the western Arctic
Published: 2024-11-29
Subjects: Glaciology
Three-Dimensional Multitrack Electrical Conductivity Method for Interpretation of Complex Ice Core Stratigraphy
Published: 2024-11-12
Subjects: Glaciology
Recent ice cores from the Allan Hills, a blue ice area in Antarctica, are nearly 3 million years old. These cores extend ice core chronologies, enabling new insight into key climate periods such as the Mid-Pleistocene Transition. The interpretation of these climate records is complex because of the disturbed stratigraphy in this ice. Here we present a new three- dimensional multitrack electrical [...]
Tracking glacier surge evolution using interferometric SAR coherence — examples from Svalbard
Published: 2024-10-14
Subjects: Earth Sciences, Glaciology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
We present a practically simple methodology for tracking glacier surge onset and evolution using interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR) coherence. Detecting surges early and monitoring their build-up is interesting for a multitude of scientific and safety-related aspects. We show that InSAR coherence maps allow the detection of surge-related instability on Svalbard many years before [...]
Structural weaknesses in ice mélange revealed by high resolution ICEYE SAR imagery
Published: 2024-10-08
Subjects: Glaciology, Physical Sciences and Mathematics
The mixture of icebergs and sea ice in tidewater glacier fjords, known as ice mélange, is postulated to impact iceberg calving directly through physical buttressing and indirectly through freshwater fluxes altering fjord circulation. In this contribution, we assess the textural characteristics of ice mélange in summer and winter at the terminus of Helheim Glacier in Greenland using high [...]