Antarctic geothermal heat flux distribution and estimated Curie Depths, links to gridded files

Antarctica is the largest reservoir of ice on Earth. Understanding its ice sheet dynamics is crucial to unraveling past global climate change and making robust climatic and sea level predictions. Of the basic parameters that shape and control ice flow, the most poorly known is geothermal heat flux....

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Martos, Yasmina M
Format: Dataset
Language:English
Published: PANGAEA 2017
Subjects:
File content
File format
File name
File size
pan-Antarctica
Uniform resource locator/link to file
Antarctic
Antarc*
Antarctica
Ice Sheet
Online Access:https://doi.pangaea.de/10.1594/PANGAEA.882503
https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.882503
Description
Summary:Antarctica is the largest reservoir of ice on Earth. Understanding its ice sheet dynamics is crucial to unraveling past global climate change and making robust climatic and sea level predictions. Of the basic parameters that shape and control ice flow, the most poorly known is geothermal heat flux. Direct observations of heat flux are difficult to obtain in Antarctica, and until now continent-wide heat flux maps have only been derived from low-resolution satellite magnetic and seismological data. We present a high resolution heat flux map and associated uncertainty derived from spectral analysis of the most advanced continental compilation of airborne magnetic data. Small-scale spatial variability and features consistent with known geology are better reproduced than in previous models, between 36% and 50%. Our high-resolution heat-flux map and its uncertainty distribution provide an important new boundary condition to be used in studies on future subglacial hydrology, ice-sheet dynamics and sea-level change.

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