Search results for "Tidewater glacier cycle"
showing 2 items of 2 documents
Termini of calving glaciers as self-organized critical systems
2014
Calving margins are highly sensitive to changes in climate and glacier terminus geometry. Numerical modelling suggests that calving glacier termini are self-organized critical systems that are fluctuating between states of advance and retreat. Over the next century, one of the largest contributions to sea level rise will come from ice sheets and glaciers calving ice into the ocean1. Factors controlling the rapid and nonlinear variations in calving fluxes are poorly understood, and therefore difficult to include in prognostic climate-forced land-ice models. Here we analyse globally distributed calving data sets from Svalbard, Alaska (USA), Greenland and Antarctica in combination with simulat…
Glacier drainage and sandur formation at Kötlujökull, South Iceland
1985
Abstract Over a number of years research on a stretch of the southeastern glacier margin of Kotlujokull in South Iceland, 8 km in length, has focused on correlating the manner of glacier drainage with the genesis of sandar, exemplified by the recent evolution of the glacier foreland. The research has yielded the following results. During an initial period, beginning prior to 1945 and ending between 1966 and 1975, a belt of moraines about 1 km wide was destroyed in stages, except for a few remnants, by 11 outbreaks of subglacial meltwater at different times and locations along the glacier front. These outbursts were associated with the genesis of “ordinary”; sandar, which are referred to her…