Heat Sources within the Greenland Ice Sheet: Dissipation, Temperate Paleo-Firn and Cryo-Hydrologic Warming

Ice temperature profiles from the Greenland Ice Sheet contain information on the deformation history, past climates and recent warming. We present full-depth temperature profiles from two drill sites on a flow line passing through Swiss Camp, West Greenland. Numerical modeling reveals that ice tempe...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Luthi, M. P., Ryser, C., Andrews, L. C., Catania, G. A., Funk, M., Hawley, R. L., Hoffman, M. J., Neumann, T. A.
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: 2015
Subjects:
ablation zone
west greenland
fast-flow
jakobshavns-isbrae
dark
region
mechanisms
deformation
boreholes
motion
level
geography
physical
geosciences
multidisciplinary
Greenland
Ice Sheet
The Cryosphere
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/2152/41107
https://doi.org/10.15781/T2CJ87M9B
https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-9-245-2015
Description
Summary:Ice temperature profiles from the Greenland Ice Sheet contain information on the deformation history, past climates and recent warming. We present full-depth temperature profiles from two drill sites on a flow line passing through Swiss Camp, West Greenland. Numerical modeling reveals that ice temperatures are considerably higher than would be expected from heat diffusion and dissipation alone. The possible causes for this extra heat are evaluated using a Lagrangian heat flow model. The model results reveal that the observations can be explained with a combination of different processes: enhanced dissipation (strain heating) in ice-age ice, temperate paleo-firn, and cryo-hydrologic warming in deep crevasses. Swiss National Science Foundation 200021_127197 US-NSF OPP 0908156, OPP 0909454, ANT-0424589 NASA within the US Department of Energy Office of Science Geological Sciences

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