2018/09/06 by Chad A. Greene, D. A. Young, David E. Gwyther +2 · 1 citation
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Medicine · #Cryospheric studies and observations #Winter Sports Injuries and Performance #Arctic and Antarctic ice dynamics #Ice shelf #Sea ice #Geology #Fast ice #Cryosphere #Ice stream #Arctic ice pack #Breakup #Antarctic sea ice #Front (military) #Climatology #Drift ice #Forcing (mathematics) #Sea ice thickness #Oceanography
paper · pdf · doi:10.5194/tc-12-2869-2018
openalex publication_date 2018/09/06 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Abstract. Previous studies of Totten Ice Shelf have employed surface velocity measurements to estimate its mass balance and understand its sensitivities to interannual changes in climate forcing. However, displacement measurements acquired over timescales of days to weeks may not accurately characterize long-term flow rates wherein ice velocity fluctuates with the seasons. Quantifying annual mass budgets or analyzing interannual changes in ice velocity requires knowing when and where observations of glacier velocity could be aliased by subannual variability. Here, we analyze 16 years of velocity data for Totten Ice Shelf, which we generate at subannual resolution by applying feature-tracking algorithms to several hundred satellite image pairs. We identify a seasonal cycle characterized by a spring to autumn speedup of more than 100 m yr−1 close to the ice front. The amplitude of the seasonal cycle diminishes with distance from the open ocean, suggesting the presence of a resistive back stress at the ice front that is strongest in winter. Springtime acceleration precedes summer surface melt and is not attributable to thinning from basal melt. We attribute the onset of ice shelf acceleration each spring to the loss of buttressing from the breakup of seasonal landfast sea ice.