Glaciological Investigation Of Mertz Glacier

• Main Authors: East Antarctica Using, Anja Pötzsch, Benoit Legresy, Wilfried Korth, Reinhard Dietrich, Tu Dresden
• Other Authors: The Pennsylvania State University CiteSeerX Archives
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Subjects: East Antarctica; Mertz Glacier; Antarc*; Antarctica
• Online Access: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.20.6163; http://earth.esa.int/pub/ESA_DOC/gothenburg/500poetz.pdf

INTRODUCTION The Mertz Glacier in East Antarctica (Fig. 1) with a length of the floating part of about 90 kilometers is one of the largest ice tongues in Antarctica. One interesting feature of such a glacier is the grounding line which is the transition of grounded to floating ice. This transition is associated with a flexure of the ice body to adjust between the vertical motion caused by ocean tides at the free floating tongue and the grounded part which is not moved by ocean tides. This phenomenon can be observed by various techniques, e. g. kinematic GPS [1], tilt measurements [2] and SAR interferometry [3], where the latter gives a unique spatial information. As SAR interferometry reveales the total effect of deformation the vertical motion due to ocean tides is superimposed by horizontal ice flow. This makes it difficult to detect the grounding line of fast flowing glaciers like the Mertz Glacier. We propose a method to use interferograms of adjacent tracks to derive the groundin