Subglacial drainage characterization from eight years of continuous borehole data on a small glacier in the Yukon Territory, Canada ...

• Main Author: Rada Giacaman, Camilo A.
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: University of British Columbia 2019
• Subjects: glacier*; Yukon
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0380813; https://doi.library.ubc.ca/10.14288/1.0380813

The subglacial drainage system is one of the main controls on basal sliding but remains only partially understood, constituting one of the most significant sources of uncertainty in glacier dynamics models. Increasing the accuracy of such models is of great importance to correctly forecast the availability of water in glaciated basins and the global sea level rise. While current glacial hydrology models are successful in reproducing the general seasonal change in surface speed and the structure of the subglacial drainage system, they fail to reproduce significant features observed in boreholes. Here we use an eight-year dataset of borehole observations on a small, alpine polythermal valley glacier in the Yukon Territory, to assess which missing physical processes in current glacier hydrology models can explain borehole observations. Our primary tool to analyze the borehole dataset and make inferences about the structure and evolution of the subglacial drainage system is a custom methodology to cluster water ...