Collaborative Research: East Antarctic Outlet Glacier Dynamics: Investigations of Beardmore Glacier

This award supports a project to conduct a suite of experiments to study spatial and temporal variations of basal conditions beneath Beardmore Glacier, an East Antarctic outlet glacier that discharges into the Ross Sea Embayment. Recent observations of rapid changes in discharge of fast-flowing outlet glaciers and ice streams suggest that dynamical responses to warming could affect that ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. Assessment of possible consequences of these responses is hampered by the lack of information about the basal boundary conditions. The leading hypothesis is that variations in basal conditions exert strong control on the discharge of outlet glaciers. Airborne and ground-based radar surveys were conducted to map the ice thickness and geometry of the sub-glacial trough and the grounding zone. Active and passive seismic experiments, together with GPS measurements were made to map ice thickness and basal sediments and response to tidal forcing (Cooley et al., 2019). An important result is radar-detected evidence of a subglacial channel that originates from beneath the glacier (Conway et al., 2019); this provides constraints on the geothermal flux and basal conditions beneath the glacier. The new bed topography differs significantly from Bedmap2; the data are being used to constrain dynamic models of the response of Beardmore Glacier to changing environmental conditions (Koutnik et al., 2019).