Journal of Glaciology

Sea ice develops a porous structure as impurities from sea water are rejected during freezing. This study revisits factors regulating noble gas inclusion in sea ice and, for the first time, parameterizes the bulk sea ice–sea water partition coefficient ( k iw )—the ratio of concentrations in sea ice to sea water—as a function of ice properties. Ten sea-water freezing experiments were conducted in…

If crevasse fields deliver meltwater to the bed of the Greenland ice sheet, it would affect seasonal ice flow speeds and total mass balance. The best current automated tool to map crevasse fields extends only a few dozen kilometers inland. To address this gap, we develop MimiNet, a neural-network-based tool that identifies surface crevasse fields. We train MimiNet on Sentinel-1 scenes across a 62…

The Canadian Arctic Archipelago constitutes a primary source of contemporary sea-level rise from glaciers and ice caps, yet glacier-scale, multi-decadal records on Baffin and Bylot Islands remain limited. This study reconstructs long-term elevation and volume change for seven glaciers, six in Auyuittuq National Park and one in Sirmilik National Park, using 1958/59 imagery from the Canadian Nation…

Formation and sudden drainage of glacial lakes pose increasing hazards in high-mountain regions, threatening downstream communities, infrastructure and ecosystems. Accurate bathymetric reconstruction and lake volume estimation are crucial for flood modeling, hazard assessment, and monitoring climate-driven glacial lake dynamics. This study uses a recently drained lake at the margin of Gornerglets…

Regional-scale glacier mass-balance (MB) estimates are essential for understanding the impacts of climate change on alpine hydrology but remain challenging to obtain. Remotely sensed phenology metrics, such as the cumulative melting index (CMI) derived from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) data, are increasingly used for MB estimation; however, the strength of this relationsh…

The firn layer in the upper part of the Antarctic ice sheet represents a crucial transitional zone during the transformation from snow to glacial ice, and its structural characteristics play an essential role in evaluating the surface mass balance of the ice sheet. Surface-wave inversion offers strong constraints on shallow subsurface stratification, and compared with conventional ambient noise, …

NASA’s ICESat-2 mission was launched in 2018, carrying a photon-counting laser altimeter, with a primary objective of measuring height changes across Earth’s surface. ICESat-2 has provided measurements of ice surface height between 88º N and S, repeated four times per year, with high vertical accuracy and along-track spatial resolution. Its accuracy and coverage has enabled near-complete recovery…

With the expansion of human activities in Antarctica, understanding snow strength characteristics has become crucial for developing transportation infrastructure such as snow roads and runways. Previous studies have established that the uniaxial compressive strength of snow is primarily governed by density and sintering time, and that pressure sintering can significantly reduce the time required …

Snow grain size is a primary control on albedo and snowmelt. Compact imaging spectrometers and lidars mounted on uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) now offer flexible, high-resolution observations, but their relative performance for optical snow property retrievals has not been assessed. We compared grain size retrievals from two UAS-mounted imaging spectrometers (925–1700 nm and 900–2500 nm) and two …

In July 1954, while making glacier mass-balance measurements in Northwest Greenland just below the boundary of the dry-snow facies, a team led by C.S. Benson documented a rain-on-snow event triggered by an atmospheric river. This produced extensive surface melt and notable ice layers, lenses and percolation columns in the snowpack that were tracked in subsequent years in snow pits dug nearby. Sin…

The basal thermal state of the Antarctic ice sheet strongly influences ice dynamics and mass balance. Although basal thermal states can be simulated using ice-sheet models, significant uncertainties persist, with poorly constrained geothermal heat flux being one important source of uncertainty. The substantial computational cost of ice-sheet models restricts large ensemble simulations essential f…

Temperate glaciers, characterized by ice at the pressure-melting point and the coexistence of solid and liquid water, are generally considered unsuitable as natural archives because meltwater undermines the paleoclimatic signals they hold. Historically, ice-core studies have favored cold glaciers. However, the ongoing atmospheric warming is driving many formerly cold portions of glaciers toward t…

Predicting the terminus position of Greenland’s marine-terminating glaciers remains a major challenge for ice-sheet modeling. Improving model parameterizations requires understanding the dominant drivers of terminus change. Here, we employ the Liang–Kleeman information flow method to quantify the contributions of bed slope, sea-ice concentration, runoff, air temperature and ocean thermal forcing …

Antarctic sea-ice extent (SIE) in 2023 hit the record low for both seasonal minimum and maximum, largely due to an exceptionally rapid decrease in November–December 2022 (periods 1 and 2) and exceptionally slow recovery in April–July 2023 (periods 3 and 4). This study assesses the capability of current operational subseasonal to seasonal (S2S) models to predict the extremely anomalous SIE during …

Whether the Lambert–Amery glacial system (LAGS) will remain near mass balance this century while adjusting to geometric change remains an open question. We couple the ice-flow model Úa to the PICO sub-shelf melt parameterization for 2020–2100 under ten high-emissions scenarios, two control experiments and targeted pinning-point perturbations. By 2100, unperturbed absolute trajectories across the …

Although most Greenland glaciers have undergone thinning and frontal retreat in recent decades, the tidewater glacier Eqalorutsit Kangilliit Sermiat in South Greenland departs from this regional pattern. This outlet glacier has advanced its terminus by almost 2 km since the mid-20th century and thickened persistently with ever-increasing rates, in contrast to neighbouring glaciers. Actively pushe…

Melt ponding on Arctic sea ice is a key indicator of the transition from a predominantly perennial to a seasonal sea-ice cover, yet quantitative data on pond depth remain limited. Here, we present the first analysis of melt-pond depth using Ice, Cloud, and land Elevation Satellite-2 (ICESat-2)’s Advanced Topographic Lidar Altimeter System (ATLAS). The Density-Dimension Algorithm for bifurcating s…

Antarctica plays a crucial role in Earth’s radiative energy balance, with the surface albedo of its snow cover being a key parameter. Snow albedo depends strongly on the optical properties of snow grains in the near-surface layers. Other factors including illumination geometry, cloud conditions and impurities influence albedo, though Antarctic snow is generally pristine. Surface roughness (SR), o…

Glacier surges are dynamic instabilities that dramatically alter glacier flow and geometry. Their triggers remain poorly understood, and improved methods of monitoring to further constrain the phenomenon are therefore important. We present a novel method for detecting glacier surges automatically using surface elevation data from NASA’s ICESat-2 laser altimetry satellite. Elevation changes from 2…

Subglacial topography is critically important for simulating ice-sheet evolution and projecting sea-level contributions. However, the subglacial topography of the Antarctic Ice Sheet is sparsely measured. Obtaining a gridded topography map used in ice-sheet simulations requires interpolating the measurements or inverting topography from observations of ice velocity and surface elevation. Traditio…