The Municipality of Anchorage (MOA), at 61 degrees north latitude, ploughs and hauls snow from urban streets throughout the winter, incorporating grit and chloride applied to street surfaces for traffic safety. Hauled snow is stored at snow disposal facilities, where it melts at ambient spring temperatures. MOA studies performed from 1998 through 2001 show that disposal site melt processes can ...

[1] Between 20 and 80 kyr ago several cooling cycles occurred in the Northern Hemisphere which culminated in a discharge of icebergs into the North Atlantic. These so called ‘‘Heinrich Events’’ (HEs) were followed by an abrupt shift to a warmer climate. Here we use a coupled ocean-atmosphere-sea ice model to study the response of the climate system under glacial conditions to a hypothetical HE....

[1] Propagation of water-filled crevasses through glaciers is investigated based on the linear elastic fracture mechanics approach. A crevasse will penetrate to the depth where the stress intensity factor at the crevasse tip equals the fracture toughness of glacier ice. A crevasse subjected to inflow of water will continue to propagate downward with the propagation speed controlled primarily by...

[1] Oxygen isotopic records of meltwater outflow and records of sea level change do not support the idea that fresh waters derived solely from the melting of Northern Hemisphere ice sheets was likely to have stabilized the upper layers of the North Atlantic Ocean and prevented deep convection during the Younger Dryas. Yet there are paleoceanographic indicators that point to a pause in the forma...

Surface meltwater that reaches the base of an ice sheet creates a mechanism for the rapid response of ice flow to climate change. The process whereby such a pathway is created through thick, cold ice has not, however, been previously observed. We describe the rapid (<2 hours) drainage of a large supraglacial lake down 980 meters through to the bed of the Greenland Ice Sheet initiated by water-d...

Movement of liquid water through snowpacks remains one of the least understood aspects of snow hydrology. Liquid water movement through snowpacks is generally recognized to occur in distinct flow paths rather than as uniform flow through a homogeneous porous medium. Dye tracer experiments have been used in studies of meltwater flow through snow since the 1930s. Although dye tracer experiments h...

In seasonally ice-free parts of the Arctic Ocean, autumn is characterized by heat loss from upper ocean to atmosphere and onset freeze up, in which first year sea ice begins grow open water areas. The timing up can be highly spatially variable, complicating efforts provide accurate forecasting for marine operations. While melt season anomalies used predict some Arctic, this one-dimensional view...