Research

My post-baccalaureate senior research project consisted of measuring solid ice discharge from the outlet glaciers of the Larsen B Embayment, Antarctic Peninsula (AP). In 2002, the Larsen B Ice Shelf rapidly disintegrated from a combination of dynamic thinning and hydrofracture from melt ponding. This event reduced the buttressing force of the ice shelf from the local outlet glaciers, allowing them to accelerate. In 2020 Dr. Michaela King found a linear relation between weighted solid ice discharge and glacier terminus retreat distance in Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) outlet glaciers. As most of Greenland's outlet glaciers are not buttressed by ice shelves, my driving question for this research was: given the similar magnitude of latitudes between GrIS and AP, will the same linear trend of retreat appear for outlet glaciers in the Larsen B embayment if I use the same methodology for calculating solid ice discharge?

Using a combination of Its_Live (NASA JPL) and Go_Live (NSIDC) ice velocity measurements via Landsat image pair offset tracking, the BEDMAP2 subglaical topography dataset, and creating a series of rolling DEMs from ICESAT-2 altimetery, I aimed to address this question.

The short answer: unlikely, but indeterminate. Building a dense point cloud from corrected ICESAT-2 data (DEMs were not available from NSIDC due to a processing error) was successful, but interpolating a DEM without a differencing method from a standard caused occasional large errors in ice thickness (I also blame the poor resolution of the BEDMAP2 dataset), throwing off results. However, there is a seasonal pattern of solid ice discharge, likely indicating basal slippage, and a large trend of downwasting mass that is causing the embayment to fill with melange and a proto ice shelf - though without a steady increase in mass balance this thickening ice in the bay is not expected to last.