Marine-terminating outlet glacier terminus positions, Disko and Uummannaq Bay, West Greenland, 1985-2015

• Main Authors: Karen Frey, Ashley York
• Format: Dataset
• Language: unknown
• Published: Arctic Data Center 2018
• Subjects: Greenland; outlet glaciers; terminus mapping; glacier; Ice Sheet; Uummannaq
• Online Access: https://search.dataone.org/view/urn:uuid:21440fc7-ebbf-4b1b-b40b-ec9d6765b6a5

Recent changes, including the dramatic speedups of several large outlet glaciers, and increased rates of surface melting, have increased Greenland’s contribution to sea-level rise from near zero in the 1990s to a large negative imbalance today. Poor knowledge of the processes driving these changes is one of the main limitations on prediction of future ice sheet contributions to sea level rise. An increasing number of observations point towards the influence of coupled ocean-ice-atmospheric processes in modulating ice sheet mass balance and outlet glacier behavior, but most studies are limited to the past few decades restricting our ability to extrapolate these relationships over longer time periods, given their high inter-annual variability. Here, we used over 1200 Landsat images spanning all seasons between 1985–2015 to investigate the behavior of 17 marine-terminating glaciers that outlet into Disko and Uummannaq Bay, West Greenland by manually digitizing over 5000 individual frontal positions. The number of observations allowed for calculation of an annual range in terminus position as an estimate of seasonal variability. The high spatial and temporal resolution of our dataset allows for insights into the seasonal and long-term behavior of West Greenland outlet glaciers and will be particularly useful for future studies such as better defining individual fjord geometry controls, understanding inland propagation of disturbances at the glacier front, and predicting occurrence of future tipping points in terminus behavior.