IEDA
Project Information
Glacial History of Ridge AB, West Antarctica
Start Date:
2001-07-01
End Date:
2024-07-18
Description/Abstract
Marine ice sheets are low-pass filters of climate variability that take centuries to adjust to interior and near-terminus changes in mass balance. Constraining these century-scale changes from satellite observations that span only the last 40 years is challenging. Here, we take a different approach of carefully synthesizing different data sets to infer changes in the configurations of van der Veen and Mercer Ice Streams on the Siple Coast over the past 3000 years from englacial features encoded in ice-penetrating radar data. Englacial radar data from Conway Ridge reveal smooth, surface conformal layers overlying disrupted stratigraphy that suggest the van der Veen Ice Stream was 40 km wider over 3000 years ago. Englacial layer dating indicates that the ice stream narrowed to its present configuration between $\sim3000$ and $\sim1000$ years ago. Similarly disrupted stratigraphy and buried crevasses suggest that ice flowing from Mercer to Whillans Ice Stream across the northwestern tip of the ridge slowed shortly after. Using an ice-flow model capable of simulating shear margin migration, we evaluate whether small changes in ice thickness can lead to large changes in shear margin location. Our results suggest that the tip of Conway Ridge is sensitive to thinning and thickening, and that when the basal strength at the tip of the ridge increases with the height above flotation, the ice sheet shear margins can change quickly.
Personnel
Person Role
Hoffman, Andrew Investigator and contact
Conway, Howard Investigator
Funding
Antarctic Glaciology Award # 0087144
AMD - DIF Record(s)
USAP-None_1
USAP-0087144_1
Data Management Plan
None in the Database
Product Level:
1 (processed data)
Datasets
Repository Title (link) Format(s) Status
USAP-DC Impulse HF radar data from Conway Ridge GZip Compressed Archive exists

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