Data supporting "Firn aquifer water discharges into crevasses across Southeast Greenland"

• Main Authors: Cicero, Eric J., Poinar, Kristin
• Format: Dataset
• Language: unknown
• Published: 2023
• Subjects: glaciology; Greenland Ice Sheet; polar regions hydrology; crevasses; glacier hydrology; melt - surface; polar firn; surface mass budget; Greenland; Airborne Topographic Mapper; glacier; Ice Sheet; Journal of Glaciology
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10477/84554

Data supporting this research article These datasets support the research article "Firn aquifer water discharges into crevasses across Southeast Greenland." Abstract for the article: "In Southeast Greenland, summer melt and high winter snowfall rates give rise to firn aquifers: vast stores of meltwater buried beneath the ice-sheet surface. Previous detailed studies of a single Greenland firn aquifer site suggest that the water drains into crevasses, but this is not known over a wide spatial scale. We develop and use a tool in Ghub, an online gateway of shared datasets, tools, and supercomputing resources for glaciology, to identify crevasses from elevation data collected by NASA’s Airborne Topographic Mapper (ATM) across 29,000~km$^2$ of Southeast Greenland. We find crevasses within 3 km of the previously mapped downglacier boundary of the firn aquifer at 20 of 25 flightline crossings. Our data suggest that crevasses widen until they reach the downglacier boundary of the firn aquifer, implying that crevasses collect firn-aquifer water, but we did not find this with statistical significance. The median crevasse width, 27 meters, implies an aspect ratio consistent with the crevasses reaching the bed. Our results support the idea that most water in Southeast Greenland firn aquifers drain through crevasses. Less common fates are discharge at the ice-sheet surface (3 of 25 sites) and refreezing at the aquifer bottom (1 of 25 sites)." National Science Foundation