As the climate warms and the area of the ice surface undergoing surface melting expands inland, a leading question is: Will a larger area of the ice sheet receive injections of meltwater, and, if so, will this lead to faster flow? 

Rapid supraglacial lake drainages—where hydro-fractures drain lakes from the surface to the bed of the ice sheet in a matter of hours—are one way for meltwater to reach the ice-sheet bed and influence Greenland Ice Sheet flow. The first half of the talk will investigate what triggers a single rapid lake drainage using a dense, local network of Global Positioning System (GPS) observations of ice-sheet surface deformation. The second half of the talk will explore stress transmission across adjacent supraglacial lake basins to determine whether the drainage of one lake makes ice-sheet surface stress conditions more or less favorable for initiating hydro-fracture in an adjacent lake basin. The talk will close by detailing our plans to measure ice-sheet surface and englacial strain for a population of mid- to upper-ablation zone supraglacial lakes over two summer field seasons.

ZOOM LINK

Meeting ID: 933 3916 0114
Passcode: 741960