Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year. (2017-2018 to 2022-2023)

The state of the subglacial environment is a first-order control on the flow of overlying ice. With greater volumes of water reaching the ice-bed interface in a warming world, basal hydrology development is a direct link between the impacts of climate change on ice dynamics and resulting sea-level rise. The difficulty of access to subglacial environments has hindered a detailed understanding of basal processes and vital questions remain about the role of water at the base of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets and in smaller but highly vulnerable valley glaciers. Use of numerical models is becoming increasingly beneficial for examining basal hydrology with the introduction of sophisticated 2D coupled models representing efficient and inefficient drainage. When this is combined with data inputs from satellite remote sensing, geophysical surveys and in situ data collection, it provides a powerful method for addressing areas where knowledge is currently lacking.

This research program will utilize such methods on a variety of spatial and temporal scales ranging from conditions in Greenland and the Antarctic, to smaller scale processes at valley glaciers in the Yukon Territory and linking together the smaller and larger scale systems in the context of global climate. The research program objectives are in the short term (1-5 years) to 1) investigate the controls of subglacial hydrology on fast-flowing Antarctic ice streams, 2) examine ice-ocean interaction at Antarctic ice shelves and Greenland tidewater glaciers, 3) address the role of climate in glacier dynamics in the Yukon Territory and, in the longer term (3-10 years), utilize the outputs from objectives 1 through 3 to 4) incorporate basal processes and subglacial hydrology into large-scale ice sheet and global climate models.

The outputs from these investigations into subglacial hydrology and ice dynamics over multiple spatial and temporal scales will give an unprecedented view of basal conditions of ice masses across the world. The combination of state-of-the-art models and data from multiple sources including remote sensing and in situ collection will provide a unique and detailed view of these vulnerable systems. The long-term goal to improve ice sheet models and global climate model predictions will utilize the results and experience gained from the individual research objectives and contribute to the next iterations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. In addition to this global approach, the individual projects will illuminate controls on ice dynamics for some of the regions most sensitive to climate-induced change, including the ablation area of the Greenland Ice Sheet, Antarctic ice streams, Antarctic ice shelves and valley glaciers that are currently diminishing the most rapidly due to warming temperatures.