Quantifying the buttressing contribution of landfast sea ice and melange to Crane Glacier, Antarctic Peninsula

Parsons, Richard; Sun, Sainan; Gudmundsson, G. Hilmar; Wuite, Jan; Nagler, Thomas

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-18-5789-2024

Articles | Volume 18, issue 12

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-18-5789-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-18-5789-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 18, issue 12

Research article

|

11 Dec 2024

Research article |

| 11 Dec 2024

Quantifying the buttressing contribution of landfast sea ice and melange to Crane Glacier, Antarctic Peninsula

Richard Parsons, Sainan Sun, G. Hilmar Gudmundsson, Jan Wuite, and Thomas Nagler

Supplement

https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-18-5789-2024-supplement

Data sets

ESA Antarctic Ice Sheet Climate Change Initiative (Antarctic_Ice_Sheet_cci): Antarctic Ice Sheet monthly velocity from 2017 to 2020 ENVEO et al. https://doi.org/10.5285/00fe090efc58446e8980992a617f632f

The Reference Elevation Model of Antarctica - Strips, Version 4.1, Ian Howat et al. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/X7NDNY

Earth Explorer U.S. Geological Survey https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/

Model code and software

GHilmarG/UaSource: Ua2019b (Version v2019b) Hilmar Gudmundsson https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3706624

Short summary

In 2022, multi-year landfast sea ice in Antarctica's Larsen B embayment disintegrated, after which time an increase in the rate at which Crane Glacier discharged ice into the ocean was observed. As the fast ice was joined to the glacier terminus, it could provide resistance against the glacier's flow, slowing down the rate of ice discharge. We used numerical modelling to quantify this resistive stress and found that the fast ice provided significant support to Crane prior to its disintegration.