Basal Drainage System Response to Increasing Surface Melt on the Greenland Ice Sheet

• Published in: Science
• Main Authors: Meierbachtol, T., Harper, J., Humphrey, N.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) 2013
• Subjects: Greenland; Ice Sheet
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1235905; https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/science.1235905

Draining Through Ice Water formed by surface melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet is transferred rapidly to the underlying bedrock, but how the water is then dispersed is less clear. This question is important because how the ice-rock interface is lubricated affects how fast the ice sheet moves. Existing conceptual models are based on observations of mountain glaciers, but Meierbachtol et al. (p. 777 see the Perspective by Lüthi ) now show that those ideas may not be applicable to the Greenland Ice Sheet. Measuring water pressures in a transect of 23 boreholes revealed that drainage structures differ between the edge, where large melt channels form, and further inland, where more distributed pathways are found.