Marine in-situ heat flow data from West Antarctica during POLARSTERN cruise ANT-XXIV/3 ...

• Main Authors: Dziadek, Ricarda, Gohl, Karsten, Diehl, Alexander, Kaul, Norbert
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: PANGAEA 2017
• Subjects: Amundsen Sea; Antarc*; Antarctic; Antarctica; Ice Sheet; Ice Shelf; Pine Island; West Antarctica
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.1594/pangaea.877683; https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.877683

Focused research on the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers, which drain the West Antarctic Ice Shelf (WAIS) into the Amundsen Sea Embayment (ASE), revealed strong signs of instability in recent decades that result from variety of reasons, such as inflow of warmer ocean currents and reverse bedrock topography and has been established as the Marine Ice Sheet Instability hypothesis. Geothermal heat flux (GHF) is a poorly constrained parameter in Antarctica and suspected to affect basal conditions of ice sheets, i.e. basal melting and subglacial hydrology. Thermomechanical models demonstrate the influential boundary condition of geothermal heat flux for (paleo) ice sheet stability. Due to a complex tectonic and magmatic history of West Antarctica, the region is suspected to exhibit strong heterogeneous geothermal heat flux variations. We present an approach to investigate ranges of realistic heat fluxes in the ASE by different methods, discuss direct observations, and 3D numerical models that incorporate boundary ... : Supplement to: Dziadek, Ricarda; Gohl, Karsten; Diehl, Alexander; Kaul, Norbert (2017): Geothermal heat flux in the Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctica: New insights from temperature measurements, depth to the bottom of the magnetic source estimation, and thermal modeling. Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, 18, 2657–2672 ...