Glaciers offer the potential to reconstruct past climate over timescales from decades to millennia. They are found on nearly every continent, and at the Last Glacial Maximum, glaciers were larger in all regions on Earth. The physics of glacier-climate interaction are relatively well understood, and glacier models can be used to reconstruct past climate from geological evidence of past glacier e...

A model for the isotopic composition in .50 and .5 180 of ice formed by refreezing at the glacier sole is developed. This model predicts relatively well the distribution of points representing samples from basal layers of an Arctic a nd an Alpine glac ier on a .50.5 180 diagram . The frozen fraction which is the part of the liquid that refreezes can be determined for each basal ice layer. This ...

We developed an automated approach for mapping persistent ice and snow cover (glaciers and perennial snowfields) from Landsat TM and ETM+ data across a variety of topography, glacier types, and climatic conditions at high latitudes (above ~65 ̋N). Our approach exploits all available Landsat scenes acquired during the late summer (1 August–15 September) over a multi-year period and employs an aut...

The ongoing retreat of glaciers at southern sub-polar latitudes is particularly rapid and widespread. Akin to northern sub-polar latitudes, this retreat is generally assumed to be linked to warming. However, no long-term and well-constrained glacier modeling has ever been performed to confirm this hypothesis. Here, we model the Cook Ice Cap mass balance on the Kerguelen Islands (Southern Indian...

[1] Here we use Ice, Cloud and land Elevation Satellite (ICESat)-derived elevations and surface characteristics to investigate the Malaspina Glacier of southern Alaska. Although there is significant elevation variability between ICESat tracks on this glacier, we were able to discern general patterns in surface elevation change by using a regional digital elevation model (DEM) as a reference sur...

Changes in velocity of the large outlet glaciers and ice streams in Antarctica are important for ice sheet mass balance and hence sea level. The ice flow velocity is also a critical variable in understanding glacier dynamics. Polar Record Glacier, with a calved iceberg in front, is about 50 km to the west of the Zhongshan Station, East Antarctica. SAR interferometry can detect the surface displ...

Understanding the timings of interhemispheric climate changes during the Holocene, along with their causes, remains a major problem of climate science. Here, we present a high-resolution 10Be chronology of glacier fluctuations in New Zealand's Southern Alps over the past 7000 years, including at least five events during the last millennium. The extents of glacier advances decreased from the mid...

[1] Thirty new 100‐year records of glacier surface mass balance, accumulation and melt in the Swiss Alps are presented. The time series are based on a comprehensive set of field data and distributed modeling and provide insights into the glacier‐climate linkage. Considerable mass loss over the 20th century is evident for all glaciers, but rates differ strongly. Glacier mass loss shows multideca...

Introduction: The McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica have commonly been used as an analog for Mars; analogies are due in part to the regions hyperarid and cold climate as well as its abundance of similar-appearing microscale and macroscale morphological features such as gullies, lineated valley fill, and polygons [eg. 1,2,3]. With the recent direct observations of water ice on Mars from the NASA...

The advance of a glacier over a deforming sediment layer is analysed numerically. We treat this problem as a contact problem involving two slowly-deforming viscous bodies. The surface evolution of the two bodies, and of the contact interface between them, is followed through time. Using various different non-linear till rheologies, we show how the mode of advance depends on the relative effecti...