Greenland Marine-Terminating Glacier Retreat Data ...

The thinning, acceleration, and retreat of Greenland glaciers since the mid-1990s has been attributed to the enhanced intrusion of warm Atlantic Waters (AW) into fjords, but this assertion has not been quantitatively tested on a Greenland-wide basis or included in numerical models. Here, we investig...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wood, Michael, Rignot, Eric, Bjørk, Anders, Van En Broeke, Michiel, Fenty, Ian, Menemenlis, Dimitris, Morlighem, Mathieu, Mouginot, Jeremie, Noël, Brice, Scheuchl, Bernd, Willis, Joshua, Zhang, Hong, An, Lu, Cai, Cilan, Kane, Emily, Millan, Romain, Velicogna, Isabella
Format: Dataset
Language:English
Published: Dryad 2019
Subjects:
glacier
ice-ocean interactions
ice mass balance
ice front
ice front position
ice velocity
ice thinning
glacier melt
Greenland
Online Access:https://dx.doi.org/10.7280/d1667w
https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.7280/D1667W
Description
Summary:The thinning, acceleration, and retreat of Greenland glaciers since the mid-1990s has been attributed to the enhanced intrusion of warm Atlantic Waters (AW) into fjords, but this assertion has not been quantitatively tested on a Greenland-wide basis or included in numerical models. Here, we investigate how AW influenced the retreat of 226 marine-terminating glaciers by combining ocean modeling, remote sensing, and in-situ observations. We identify 74 glaciers standing in deep fjords with warm AW that retreated when ocean warming induced a 48% increase in glacier undercutting that controlled 62% of the glacier mass loss in 1992-2017. Conversely, 27 glaciers calving on protective, shallow ridges and 24 glaciers standing in cold, shallow waters did not retreat; and 10 glaciers retreated when their floating sections collapsed. The mechanisms of ice front evolution remain undiagnosed at 87 glaciers with no ocean and bathymetry data, but these glaciers only account for 16% of the retreat. Projections of glacier ...

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