Taku Glacier velocity fields from TerraSAR-X satellite data, Alaska, 2010-2025

### Access

Data files can be accessed via: https://arcticdata.io/data/10.18739/A21N7XP76/

### Overview

Tidewater glaciers are known to undergo cycles of slow, centennial-scale advance and rapid, decadal-scale retreat that are driven by processes occurring at the glacier-ocean interface, including iceberg calving, submarine melting, and sediment deposition and erosion. These cycles can occur in a steady climate, but climate can modify the timescales of advance and retreat as well as act as a trigger. Since the advance phase is longer than the retreat phase, in a steady climate one would expect the majority of tidewater glaciers to be advancing. This is not the case at present, as the majority of tidewater glaciers around the world are retreating or in a quasi-stable configuration. Until recently, Taku Glacier in Southeast Alaska was one of the rare advancing tidewater glaciers. Recent observations indicate that, due to a warming climate, the glacier is now thinning over its entire area and has begun to retreat off of the terminal moraine that it developed and prograded over the past 125 years. This project is investigating the processes by which a tidewater glacier transitions into retreat, and the evolving glacier sensitivity to climate during this transition, by integrating drone and remote sensing observations of Taku Glacier with numerical modeling experiments. Drone surveys of the glacier terminus are being collected several times (~monthly) each summer in order to characterize changes in glacier geometry and flow during the early stages of retreat. This dataset includes velocity fields of Taku Glacier derived from TerraSAR-X satellite data.