Lateral meltwater transfer across an Antarctic ice shelf ...

• Main Authors: Dell, Rebecca, Arnold, Neil, Willis, Ian, Banwell, Alison, Williamson, Andrew, Pritchard, Hamish, Orr, Andrew
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Copernicus Publications 2020
• Subjects: 37 Earth Sciences; 3709 Physical Geography and Environmental Geoscience; Antarctic; Nivlisen; Antarc*; Ice Shelf; Ice Shelves
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.17863/cam.55427; https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/308335

Surface meltwater on ice shelves can exist as slush, it can pond in lakes or crevasses, or it can flow in surface streams and rivers. The collapse of the Larsen B Ice Shelf in 2002 has been attributed to the sudden drainage of ~3000 surface lakes, and has highlighted the potential for surface water to cause ice-shelf instability. Surface meltwater systems have been identified across numerous Antarctic ice shelves, although the extent to which these systems impact ice-shelf instability is poorly constrained. To better understand the role of surface meltwater systems on ice shelves, it is important to track their seasonal development, monitoring the fluctuations in surface water volume and the transfer of water across ice-shelf surfaces. Here, we use Landsat 8 and Sentinel-2 imagery to track surface meltwater across the Nivlisen Ice Shelf in the 2016-2017 melt season. We develop the Fully Automated Supraglacial-Water Tracking algorithm for Ice Shelves (FASTISh) and use it to identify and track the development ...