Lakes on glaciers hold large volumes of water which can drain through the ice, influencing estimates of sea level rise. To estimate water volume, we must calculate lake depth. We assessed the accuracy of three satellite-based depth detection methods on a study area in western Greenland and considered the implications for quantifying the volume of water within lakes. We found that the most popular method of detecting depth on the ice sheet scale has higher uncertainty than previously assumed.

Under the right topographic and hydrological conditions, lakes may form beneath the large ice sheets. Some of these subglacial lakes are active, meaning that they periodically drain and refill. When a subglacial lake drains rapidly, it may cause the ice surface above to collapse, and here we investigate how to improve the monitoring of active subglacial lakes in Greenland by monitoring how their associated collapse basins change over time.

We developed a new supraglacial hydrology model for the Greenland Ice Sheet. This model simulates surface meltwater routing, meltwater drainage, supraglacial lake (SGL) overflow, and formation of lake ice. The model was able to reproduce 80 % of observed lake locations and provides a good match between the observed and modelled temporal evolution of SGLs.

Climate models provide valuable information for studying processes such as the collapse of ice shelves over Antarctica which impact estimates of sea level rise. This paper examines variability across climate simulations over Antarctica for fields including snowfall, temperature and melt. Significant systematic differences between outputs are found, occurring at both large and fine spatial scales across Antarctica. Results are important for future impact assessments and model development.

We identify 119 km² of meltwater area over West Antarctica in January 2017. In combination with Stokes et al., 2019, this forms the first continent-wide assessment helping to quantify the mass balance of Antarctica and its contribution to global sea level rise. We apply thresholds for meltwater classification to satellite images, mapping the extent and manually post-processing to remove false positives. Our study provides a high-fidelity dataset to train and validate machine learning methods.

We find that the area covered by lakes on George VI ice shelf in 2020 is similar to that seen in other years such as 1989. However, the climate conditions are much more in favour of lakes forming. We find that it is likely that snowfall, and the build up of a surface snow layer limits the development of lakes on the surface of George VI ice shelf in 2020. We also find that in future, snowfall is predicted to decrease, and therefore this limiting effect may be reduced in future.