Monitoring of the Greenland ice sheet using a broadband seismometer network: the GLISN project

Global climate change is currently causing melting of the Greenland ice sheet. Recently, a new type of seismic event, referred to as a "glacial earthquake", has been recognized. Such earthquakes are generated by the movements of large masses of ice within the terminal regions of glacier, a...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Genti Toyokuni, Masaki Kanao, Yoko Tono, Tetsuto Himeno, Seiji Tsuboi, Dean Childs, Kent Anderson, Hiroshi Takenaka
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: National Institute of Polar Research 2014
Subjects:
geo
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.15094/00009722
https://doaj.org/article/997b9c03b10c490b935fafc893808343
Description
Summary:Global climate change is currently causing melting of the Greenland ice sheet. Recently, a new type of seismic event, referred to as a "glacial earthquake", has been recognized. Such earthquakes are generated by the movements of large masses of ice within the terminal regions of glacier, and represent a new approach for monitoring ice sheet dynamics. In 2009, the multinational GreenLand Ice Sheet monitoring Network (GLISN), a large broadband seismological network in and around Greenland, was initiated to monitor these events. Japan, a partner country of the GLISN project, has been sending a field team to Greenland each year since 2011, when a joint USA and Japanese team first established a dual seismic-GPS station (station code: ICESG-GLS2) on the Greenland ice sheet. In 2012, the same team contributed to the maintenance of ICESG-GLS2, as well as two other stations (NUUK and DY2G-GLS1). The quality of the long-period seismic waveform data obtained by these stations has been checked by comparing the data with global synthetic seismograms. Results indicate that the data from the three stations have not been substantially affected by noise, and that the quality is well controlled.