Basal age, surface accumulation, basal melting, geothermal flux and Lliboutry exponent of the velocity profile in the Dome C area

Ice sheets provide exceptional archives of past changes in polar climate, regional environment and global atmospheric composition. The oldest dated deep ice core drilled in Antarctica has been retrieved at EPICA Dome C (EDC), reaching ~800,000 years. Obtaining an older paleoclimatic record from Anta...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Parrenin, Frédéric, Cavitte, Marie G P, Blankenship, Donald D, Chappellaz, Jérôme A, Fischer, Hubertus, Gagliardini, Olivier, Masson-Delmotte, Valerie, Passalacqua, Olivier, Ritz, Catherine, Roberts, Jason L, Siegert, Martin J, Young, Duncan A
Format: Dataset
Language:English
Published: PANGAEA 2017
Subjects:
Accumulation rate
standard deviation
Accumulation rate in ice equivalent per year
AGE
Antarctica
Distance
DomeC_area
Factor
Ground heat
flux
Height
Ice thickness
LATITUDE
LONGITUDE
Melt rate
MULT
Multiple investigations
Number of years
Antarc*
EPICA
ice core
Ice Sheet
The Cryosphere
Online Access:https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.882249
https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.882249
Description
Summary:Ice sheets provide exceptional archives of past changes in polar climate, regional environment and global atmospheric composition. The oldest dated deep ice core drilled in Antarctica has been retrieved at EPICA Dome C (EDC), reaching ~800,000 years. Obtaining an older paleoclimatic record from Antarctica is one of the greatest challenges of the ice core community. Here, we use internal isochrones, identified from airborne radar coupled to ice-flow modelling to estimate the age of basal ice along transects in the Dome C area. Three glaciological properties are inverted from isochrones: surface accumulation rate; geothermal flux; and the exponent of the Lliboutry velocity profile. We find that old ice (>1 Myr, 1 million years) likely exists in two regions: one ~40 km south-west of Dome C along the ice divide to Vostok, close to a secondary dome that we name "Little Dome C" (LDC); and a second region named "North Patch" (NP) located 10-30 km north-east of Dome C, in a region where the geothermal flux is apparently relatively low. Our work demonstrates the value of combining radar observations with ice flow modelling to accurately represent the true nature of ice flow, and the formation of ice-sheet architecture, in the centre of large ice sheets.

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