Rapid retreat of Thwaites Glacier in the pre-satellite era

Rapid retreat and acceleration of Helheim Glacier, east Greenland

[1] A significant amount of the measured coastal thinning of the Greenland ice sheet may be due to recent acceleration of outlet glaciers. Using remote sensing, we measured two major periods of speedup on Helheim Glacier between 2000 and 2005 that increased peak speeds from approximately 8 to 11 km/yr. These speedups coincided with rapid retreats of the calving front, totaling over 7.5 km. The ...

Sustained retreat of the Pine Island Glacier

Connected subglacial lake drainage beneath Thwaites Glacier, West Antarctica

We present conventional and swath altimetry data from Cryosat-2 revealing a system of subglacial lakes that drained between June 2013 and January 2014 under the central part of Thwaites Glacier, West Antarctica. Much of the 10 drainage happened in less than six months, with an apparent connection between three lakes spanning more than 130 km. Hydropotential analysis of the glacier bed shows a l...

Recent, very rapid retreat of a temperate glacier in SE Iceland

Iceland’s glaciers are particularly sensitive to climate change, and their margins respond to trends in air temperature. Most Icelandic glaciers have been in retreat since c. 1990, and almost all since 1995. Using ice-front measurements, photographic and geomorphological evidence, we examined the record of ice-front fluctuations of Virkisjökull–Falljökull, a steep high-mass-turnover outlet glac...

Rapid early Holocene retreat of a Laurentide outlet glacier through an Arctic fjord

Ice-sheet behaviour is disproportionately controlled by the dynamics of outlet glaciers that terminate in the ocean1,2. However, outlet-glacier dynamics—particularly over timescales longer than the observational record—are not well understood3, leading to uncertainties in our models of ice-sheet response to climate change. Here we use 10Be exposure ages and radiocarbon dating from the Sam Ford ...