Dynamic changes on the Wilkins Ice Shelf during the 2006–2009 retreat derived from satellite observations

Rankl, Melanie; Fürst, Johannes Jakob; Humbert, Angelika; Braun, Matthias Holger

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-11-1199-2017

Articles | Volume 11, issue 3

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-11-1199-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-11-1199-2017

© Author(s) 2017. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Articles | Volume 11, issue 3

Research article

|

12 May 2017

Research article |

| 12 May 2017

Dynamic changes on the Wilkins Ice Shelf during the 2006–2009 retreat derived from satellite observations

Melanie Rankl, Johannes Jakob Fürst, Angelika Humbert, and Matthias Holger Braun

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Final revised paper (published on 12 May 2017)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 18 Oct 2016)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

AC: Author comment | RC: Referee comment | SC: Short comment | EC: Editor comment

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- Supplement

RC1: 'Review for TC-2016-218', Reinhard Drews, 15 Nov 2016
- AC1: 'Reply to interactive comments', Melanie Rankl, 20 Jan 2017
RC2: 'Review of Rankl et al.', T A Scambos, 22 Nov 2016
- AC2: 'Reply to interactive comments', Melanie Rankl, 20 Jan 2017

Peer-review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision

AR by Melanie Rankl on behalf of the Authors (20 Jan 2017) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (06 Feb 2017) by G. Hilmar Gudmundsson

RR by Reinhard Drews (20 Feb 2017)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

The revised manuscript is certainly an improved compared to the first version. In particular, the results and implications appear now more clearly. Below I have a number of suggestions concerning style/presentation which the authors may find helpful (as a non-native speaker I do not insist on their implementation). The paper could be shortened even more.

Overall, I congratulate the authors on a nice piece of work. Approaches like this will become increasingly important with the upcoming time-series of surface velocities from the Sentinel and Landsat satellites.

Reinhard Drews

ABSTRACT
p1 l 8: remove "can"
p1 l 10: replace "This present study..." with "This study.." or "Here, we.." to avoid repetition with the same opening two sentences later.
p1 l 12: replace "in respect" with "relativ"
p1 l 15: replace "the ice bridge" with "an ice bridge" (the ice bridge is has not been introduced yet)
p1 l 16: How about rephrasing: "We identify areas that are important for buttressing and areas prone to fracturing using in-flow and ..."
p1 l 17: "Further propagation.." of what? (the connection to the "speed-up" mentioned two sentences earlier is lost at this stage).
p1 l 18: How about: "Positive second principal stresses are another scale-free indicator..."
p1 l 19: remove "rather"
Comment: I am somehow missing a punchy last sentence in the Abstract about the main conclusion/implications of this study.

INTRODUCTION
p1 l 30: move reference Paolo et al., 2015 to l 29 (after "thinning rates") to avoid the double-brackets.
p1 l 35: I suggest to remove "As it is long known..." and start right away with "There were regular attempts..".
p2 l 2: "The smaller, second principal.."
p2 l 7: "the the"
p2 l 8: replace "not very stable" with "unstable"
p2 l 10: replace "stability issue" with "ice-sheet stability" (if this is what you mean)
p2 l 11: "shelf-ice area" or "ice-shelf area" ? I think it should be the latter.
p2 l 12: Remove sentence: "For the Bellinghausen Sea...." this is not relevant here.
p2 l 13: replace second "during" with "over" to avoid repetition
p2 l 16: "..first assessment of previously invoked stability criteria."

STUDY AREA
p2 l18: Consider a better section heading. Maybe something like "Regional setting and history of the WIS"
p2 l35: Remove "Continous" with "The"
p2 l35: Replace "ice connection" with "ice bridge" in all instances to use coherent terminology with Figure 1 and the later text/abstract.
p3 l7: What is the relevance of the released energy in general, and for this paper in particular? I suggest removal of this sentence.

SURFACE VELOCITIES
p3 l 21: Replace "output spatial resolution" with "spatial gridding". I also don't fully agree that the strain rates are resolved on a 50 m grid, because you apply heavy smoothing (1x1 km) to avoid noise amplification. Saying they were "gridded" to 50 m is more correct.
p3 l 25: Ice on ice rises is not "non-moving". It is maybe "slow-moving" (near divides with several meters per year).
p3 l 34: Remove "Of course,"
p3 l 37: Replace "most important" with "most significant" implying that the flow differences are larger than the observational errors.
p4 l 20: Replace "also true" with "comparable with"

STRESS TENSOR AND STRAIN RATES
p4 l 29 Shorten: "Ice is typically described as a non-Newtonian.." (there are many possibilities like this to make the paper more succinct).
p4 l 31: "The constitutive equation.." (remove "In its most general form")
p5 l 2: replace "in case there is no" with "in areas without"
p5 l 5: is it no "subtracting"?
p5 l 7: "where satellite data were acquired" (data is plural)
p5 l 16: WATCH OUT: I understand that second invariant of a matrix A is 0.5*(tr(A)^2-tr(A^2)) so there should be some off-diagnal elements in there. I don't see this in your revised description which uses only "ii" indices. Did I miss something?
p5 l 29: "the change in them" with "temporal changes"

OVERVIEW
p6 l 7: Consider more informative section heading.
p6 l 9: The ice shelf is mainly fed by surface accumulation (as stated in abstract)
p6 l 10: replace "once the grounding line is passed" with "seawards of the grounding line"
p6 l 11: "quickly" is temporal. Maybe "abruptly"?.
p6 l 26 "mostly limit the discussion" ? Remove "mostly". Maybe "We limit the discussion to...unless specified otherwise".
p7 l 1: "This stress-flow angle was introduced..." and the following sentence are repetitive to intro. Consider streamlining.
p7 l 8: Replace "In this present study.." with "Here, we..."

RETREAT STAGES
p7 l 13: Is the 1993 break-up mentioned in Section 2? If not, it should be mentioned there.
p8 l 5: "which was the reason for why" remove "for"

A PRORI INDICATIONS...
p9 l 7" "we want to follow" replace "we follow"
p9 l 16: this paragraph is now much clearer.

CONCLUSIONS
p9 l 35 "rather insensitive" "rather unfavorable" there is a lot of rathers throughout the manuscript.
Same as for the abstract I suggest to end the conclusions with a more positive note summarizing the main conclusions/implications.

Figure S2: Shouldn't the vertical displacement of point F be zero (i.e. is the profile A-A' flipped left/right)?

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (Editor review) (16 Mar 2017) by G. Hilmar Gudmundsson

AR by Melanie Rankl on behalf of the Authors (22 Mar 2017) Author's response Manuscript

ED: Publish as is (01 Apr 2017) by G. Hilmar Gudmundsson

AR by Johannes J. Fürst on behalf of the Authors (07 Apr 2017) Manuscript