Surface Mass Balance Controlled by Local Surface Slope in Inland Antarctica: Implications for Ice-Sheet Mass Balance and Oldest Ice Delineation in Dome Fuji

• Main Authors: Van Liefferinge, Brice, Taylor, Drew, Tsutaki, Shun, Fujita, Shuji, Gogineni, Prasad, Kawamura, Kenji, Matsuoka, Kenichi, Moholdt, Geir, Oyabu, Ikumi, Abe-Ouchi, Ayako, Awasthi, Abhishek, Buizert, Christo, Gallet, Jean‐Charles, Isaksson, Elisabeth, Motoyama, Hideaki, Nakazawa, Fumio, Ohno, Hiroshi, O’Neill, Charles, Pattyn, Frank, Sugiura, Konosuke
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: Généralités; firn stratigraphy; microwave radar; Antarctic; The Antarctic; Dome Fuji; Antarc*; Antarctica; Ice Sheet
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2013/ULB-DIPOT:oai:dipot.ulb.ac.be:2013/339156; https://dipot.ulb.ac.be/dspace/bitstream/2013/339156/3/VanLiefferinge2021_GRL.pdf

The limited number of surface mass balance (SMB) observations in the Antarctic inland hampers estimates of ice-sheet contribution to global sea level and locations with million-year-old ice. We present finely resolved SMB over the past three centuries in a low-accumulation region with significant depth hoar formation on Dome Fuji derived from ∼1,100 km of microwave radar stratigraphy dated with a firn core. The regional-mean SMB over the past 264 years is estimated to ∼22.5 ± 3.3 kg m−2 a−1, but with large local variability of up to 30%. We found that local SMB is negatively correlated with surface slope at scales of a few hundred meters, resulting in anomalous zones of low SMB which represent as much as 8–10% of the total SMB on the inland plateau if the SMB-slope relationship is more widely valid. This impact should be investigated further to improve estimates of Antarctic mass balance and sea-level contribution. SCOPUS: le.j info:eu-repo/semantics/published