Marine Science Faculty Publications
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2017
Keywords
Pine Island Glacier, West Antarctic Ice Sheet, autonomous underwater vehicle, ice sheet dynamics, bed forms, marine geophysics
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.1002/2017JF004311
Abstract
Pine Island Glacier Ice Shelf (PIGIS) has been thinning rapidly over recent decades, resulting in a progressive drawdown of the inland ice and an upstream migration of the grounding line. The resultant ice loss from Pine Island Glacier (PIG) and its neighboring ice streams presently contributes an estimated ∼10% to global sea level rise, motivating efforts to constrain better the rate of future ice retreat. One route toward gaining a better understanding of the processes required to underpin physically based projections is provided by examining assemblages of landforms and sediment exposed over recent decades by the ongoing ungrounding of PIG. Here we present high-resolution bathymetry and sub-bottom-profiler data acquired by autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) surveys beneath PIGIS in 2009 and 2014, respectively. We identify landforms and sediments associated with grounded ice flow, proglacial and subglacial sediment transport, overprinting of lightly grounded ice-shelf keels, and stepwise grounding line retreat. The location of a submarine ridge (Jenkins Ridge) coincides with a transition from exposed crystalline bedrock to abundant sediment cover potentially linked to a thick sedimentary basin extending upstream of the modern grounding line. The capability of acquiring high-resolution data from AUV platforms enables observations of landforms and understanding of processes on a scale that is not possible in standard offshore geophysical surveys.
Rights Information
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Was this content written or created while at USF?
No
Citation / Publisher Attribution
Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface, v. 122, issue 9, p. 1698-1714
Scholar Commons Citation
Davies, D.; Bingham, R. G.; Graham, A. G. C.; Spagnolo, M.; Dutrieux, P.; Vaughan, D. G.; Jenkins, A.; and Nitsche, F. O., "High-resolution Sub-ice-shelf Seafloor Records of Twentieth Century Ungrounding and Retreat of Pine Island Glacier, West Antarctica" (2017). Marine Science Faculty Publications. 1569.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/msc_facpub/1569
