Mt. Everest’s highest glacier is a sentinel for accelerating ice loss

Rheology of glacier ice.

A new method for calculating the stress field in bounded ice shelves is used to compare strain rate and deviatoric stress on the Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica. The analysis shows that strain rate (per second) increases as the third power of deviatoric stress (in newtons per square meter), with a constant of proportionality equal to 2.3 x 10(-25).

Accelerating ice loss from the fastest Greenland and Antarctic glaciers

[1] Ice discharge from the fastest glaciers draining the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets – Jakobshavn Isbrae (JI) and Pine Island Glacier (PIG)– continues to increase, and is now more than double that needed to balance snowfall in their catchment basins. Velocity increase probably resulted from decreased buttressing from thinning (and, for JI, breakup) of their floating ice tongues, and from...

Greenland outlet glacier ice - flow variability

1 I ce mass loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet is a primary contributor to global sea level rise. The rate of ice loss has accelerated over the last couple of decades and Greenland currently contributes about 0.7-1.1 mm/yr to sea-level rise (260-380 Gt/ice per year; Enderlin et al. 2014; Shepherd et al. 2012). Predicting the potential rate and limits of future mass loss requires a clear understa...

Snow Avalanches, Ice Avalanches and Glacier Surges

Ice velocity and climate variations for Baltoro Glacier, Pakistan

The recent dynamic behaviour of Karakoram glaciers is expected to differ from that shown by glaciers in the central and eastern Himalaya because of regional variations in precipitation and temperature trends. However, there are insufficient quantitative data to support or confute such hypotheses. We present velocity data covering the period 1993–2008 for Baltoro Glacier, one of the longest glac...