Inferring Tideâ€Induced Ephemeral Grounding in an Iceâ€Shelfâ€Stream System: Rutford Ice Stream, West Antarctica

• Published in: Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface
• Main Authors: Zhong, Minyan, Simons, Mark, Minchew, Brent, Zhu, Lijun
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: American Geophysical Union 2023
• Subjects: Earth-Surface Processes; Geophysics; Antarctic; Rutford; Rutford Ice Stream; Sergienko; West Antarctica; Antarc*; Antarctica; Ice Shelf; Ice Shelves
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.1029/2022jf006789

Antarctic ice shelves play a key role in regulating the rate of ice flow in tributary ice streams. Temporal variations in the associated ice-shelf buttressing stress are observed to impact ice flow in glaciers and ice streams. Ephemeral grounding induced by tides is an important mechanism for modulating the buttressing stress. Here, we develop an approach to inferring variations in 3-D surface displacements at an ice-shelf-stream system that explicitly accounts for ephemeral grounding. Using a temporally dense nine-month-long synthetic-aperture radar image acquisition campaign collected over Rutford Ice Stream, West Antarctica, by the 4-satellite COSMO-SkyMed constellation, we infer the ephemeral grounding zones and the spatiotemporal variation of the fortnightly ice-flow variability. We find ephemeral grounding zones along the western ice-shelf margin as well as a few prominent ephemeral grounding points in the central trunk and in the vicinity of the grounding zone. Our observations provide evidence for tide-modulated buttressing stress and the temporally asymmetric response of ice-shelf flow to tidal forcing. Long-term oceanic warming and ice-shelf thinning will cause the loss of ephemeral grounding and decrease in ice-shelf buttressing stress. © 2023. American Geophysical Union. The authors thank ASI for their efforts in making the observational campaign at Rutford Ice Stream successful and the SAR data available. M.Z. thanks Andrew F. Thompson and Victor C. Tsai for insightful discussions. B.M. acknowledges NSF-NERC Awards 1853918 and 1739031. The authors thank editor Olga Sergienko, Alexander Robel, and an anonymous reviwer for their comments that help improve the manuscript. Data Availability Statement: The velocity and displacement field components (Zhong et al., 2022) are archived at https://zenodo.org/record/6615587#.Yp1DbGDMLao. Software used to perform feature tracking on SAR images (Zhu et al., 2022) is freely available at https://github.com/lijun99/cuAmpcor. Software used to infer ephemeral ...