Dynamic vulnerability revealed in the collapse of an Arctic tidewater glacier
Glacier flow instabilities can rapidly increase sea level through enhanced ice discharge. Surge-type glacier accelerations often occur with a decadal to centennial cyclicity suggesting internal mechanisms responsible. Recently, many surging tidewater glaciers around the Arctic Barents Sea region que...
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ftpubmed:oai:pubmedcentral.nih.gov:6447555 2023-05-15T14:48:22+02:00 Dynamic vulnerability revealed in the collapse of an Arctic tidewater glacier Nuth, Christopher Gilbert, Adrien Köhler, Andreas McNabb, Robert Schellenberger, Thomas Sevestre, Heïdi Weidle, Christian Girod, Luc Luckman, Adrian Kääb, Andreas 2019-04-03 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6447555/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30944339 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-41117-0 en eng Nature Publishing Group UK http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6447555/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30944339 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-41117-0 © The Author(s) 2019 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. CC-BY Article Text 2019 ftpubmed https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-41117-0 2019-04-14T00:22:07Z Glacier flow instabilities can rapidly increase sea level through enhanced ice discharge. Surge-type glacier accelerations often occur with a decadal to centennial cyclicity suggesting internal mechanisms responsible. Recently, many surging tidewater glaciers around the Arctic Barents Sea region question whether external forces such as climate can trigger dynamic instabilities. Here, we identify a mechanism in which climate change can instigate surges of Arctic tidewater glaciers. Using satellite and seismic remote sensing observations combined with three-dimensional thermo-mechanical modeling of the January 2009 collapse of the Nathorst Glacier System (NGS) in Svalbard, we show that an underlying condition for instability was basal freezing and associated friction increase under the glacier tongue. In contrast, continued basal sliding further upstream increased driving stresses until eventual and sudden till failure under the tongue. The instability propagated rapidly up-glacier, mobilizing the entire 450 km(2) glacier basin over a few days as the till entered an unstable friction regime. Enhanced mass loss during and after the collapse (5–7 fold compared to pre-collapse mass losses) combined with regionally rising equilibrium line altitudes strongly limit mass replenishment of the glacier, suggesting irreversible consequences. Climate plays a paradoxical role as cold glacier thinning and retreat promote basal freezing which increases friction at the tongue by stabilizing an efficient basal drainage system. However, with some of the most intense atmospheric warming on Earth occurring in the Arctic, increased melt water can reduce till strength under tidewater glacier tongues to orchestrate a temporal clustering of surges at decadal timescales, such as those observed in Svalbard at the end of the Little Ice Age. Consequently, basal terminus freezing promotes a dynamic vulnerability to climate change that may be present in many Arctic tidewater glaciers. Text Arctic Barents Sea Climate change glacier Svalbard Tidewater PubMed Central (PMC) Arctic Barents Sea Svalbard Scientific Reports 9 1 |
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Article Nuth, Christopher Gilbert, Adrien Köhler, Andreas McNabb, Robert Schellenberger, Thomas Sevestre, Heïdi Weidle, Christian Girod, Luc Luckman, Adrian Kääb, Andreas Dynamic vulnerability revealed in the collapse of an Arctic tidewater glacier |
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Glacier flow instabilities can rapidly increase sea level through enhanced ice discharge. Surge-type glacier accelerations often occur with a decadal to centennial cyclicity suggesting internal mechanisms responsible. Recently, many surging tidewater glaciers around the Arctic Barents Sea region question whether external forces such as climate can trigger dynamic instabilities. Here, we identify a mechanism in which climate change can instigate surges of Arctic tidewater glaciers. Using satellite and seismic remote sensing observations combined with three-dimensional thermo-mechanical modeling of the January 2009 collapse of the Nathorst Glacier System (NGS) in Svalbard, we show that an underlying condition for instability was basal freezing and associated friction increase under the glacier tongue. In contrast, continued basal sliding further upstream increased driving stresses until eventual and sudden till failure under the tongue. The instability propagated rapidly up-glacier, mobilizing the entire 450 km(2) glacier basin over a few days as the till entered an unstable friction regime. Enhanced mass loss during and after the collapse (5–7 fold compared to pre-collapse mass losses) combined with regionally rising equilibrium line altitudes strongly limit mass replenishment of the glacier, suggesting irreversible consequences. Climate plays a paradoxical role as cold glacier thinning and retreat promote basal freezing which increases friction at the tongue by stabilizing an efficient basal drainage system. However, with some of the most intense atmospheric warming on Earth occurring in the Arctic, increased melt water can reduce till strength under tidewater glacier tongues to orchestrate a temporal clustering of surges at decadal timescales, such as those observed in Svalbard at the end of the Little Ice Age. Consequently, basal terminus freezing promotes a dynamic vulnerability to climate change that may be present in many Arctic tidewater glaciers. |
format |
Text |
author |
Nuth, Christopher Gilbert, Adrien Köhler, Andreas McNabb, Robert Schellenberger, Thomas Sevestre, Heïdi Weidle, Christian Girod, Luc Luckman, Adrian Kääb, Andreas |
author_facet |
Nuth, Christopher Gilbert, Adrien Köhler, Andreas McNabb, Robert Schellenberger, Thomas Sevestre, Heïdi Weidle, Christian Girod, Luc Luckman, Adrian Kääb, Andreas |
author_sort |
Nuth, Christopher |
title |
Dynamic vulnerability revealed in the collapse of an Arctic tidewater glacier |
title_short |
Dynamic vulnerability revealed in the collapse of an Arctic tidewater glacier |
title_full |
Dynamic vulnerability revealed in the collapse of an Arctic tidewater glacier |
title_fullStr |
Dynamic vulnerability revealed in the collapse of an Arctic tidewater glacier |
title_full_unstemmed |
Dynamic vulnerability revealed in the collapse of an Arctic tidewater glacier |
title_sort |
dynamic vulnerability revealed in the collapse of an arctic tidewater glacier |
publisher |
Nature Publishing Group UK |
publishDate |
2019 |
url |
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6447555/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30944339 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-41117-0 |
geographic |
Arctic Barents Sea Svalbard |
geographic_facet |
Arctic Barents Sea Svalbard |
genre |
Arctic Barents Sea Climate change glacier Svalbard Tidewater |
genre_facet |
Arctic Barents Sea Climate change glacier Svalbard Tidewater |
op_relation |
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6447555/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30944339 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-41117-0 |
op_rights |
© The Author(s) 2019 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
op_rightsnorm |
CC-BY |
op_doi |
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-41117-0 |
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Scientific Reports |
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9 |
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1 |
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