To investigate the Arctic Ocean Circulation, results from a high-resolution fully global ocean model have been analyzed. The results come from two runs of the Ocean Circulation and Climate Advanced Modelling project (OCCAM) model, developed and run by the Southampton Oceanography Centre, at 1/4° × 1/4° and 1/8° × 1/8° resolution. The model is based on the Bryan-Semtner-Cox model and has 36 vertical levels. Enhancements include a free surface, an improved advection scheme and an improved treatment of the surface fresh-water flux. The model is forced with a monthly European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts wind-stress climatology. It reproduces many of the fine-scale features found in the Arctic Ocean. The analysis concentrates on several of the key features, including the highly energetic eddy system in the western part of the Beaufort Sea, East Greenland West and Spitsbergen Currents and the detailed structure of the marginal currents along the Siberian and Canadian coasts. Much of the paper is focused on the water transport through the Bering and Fram Straits and through the Canadian Archipelago. Comparisons of the model net fluxes through the straits against observations are presented. The analyses of the results demonstrate the ability of the fine-resolution model to simulate features such as small-scale eddies and jets, which have some agreement with the limited observations available.

The net surface snow accumulation on the Antarctic ice sheet is determined by a combination of precipitation, sublimation and wind redistribution. We present a 1 year record of hourly snow-height measurements that shows its seasonal variability. The measurements were made with an ultrasonic sensor mounted on an automatic weather station (AWS) installed at LGB69, Princess Elizabeth Land, Antarctica (70.835˚S, 77.075˚E; 1850 ma.s.l.). The average accumulation at this site is approximately 0.70 m snow a–1. Throughout the winter, between April and September, there was little change in surface snow height. The strongest accumulation occurred during the period October–March, with four episodic increases occurring during 2002. These episodic events coincided with obvious humidity ‘pulses’ and decreases of incoming solar radiation as recorded by the AWS. Observations of the total cloud amount at Davis station, 160 km north-northeast of LGB69, showed good correlation with major accumulation events recorded at LGB69. There was an obvious anticorrelation between the lowest cloud height at Davis and the daily accumulation rate at LGB69. Although there was no correlation over the total year between wind speed and accumulation at LGB69, large individual accumulation events are associated with episodes of strong wind. Strong accumulation events at LGB69 are associated with major storms in the region and inland transport of moist air masses from the coast.

A continuous ECM profile (strong acid concentration) has been measured along the 2191 m of ice core recovered at Byrd Station, Antarctica, in 1968. The ECM profile reveals continuous and systematic seasonal changes which are used for dating the ice core back to 50 000 bp. Hammer and others: ECM stratigraphic dating of Byrd Station ice core, Antarctica

Detailed measurements of surface topography, ice motion, snow accumulation, and ice thickness were made in January 1974 and again in December 1984, along an 8 km stake network extending from the ice sheet, across the grounding line, and on to floating ice shelf in the mouth of slow-moving Ice Stream C, which flows into the eastern side of Ross Ice Shelf, Antarctica. During the 11 years between surveys, the grounding line retreated by approximately 300 m. This was caused by net thinning of the ice shelf, which we believe to be a response to the comparatively recent, major decrease in ice discharge from Ice Stream C. Farther inland, snow accumulation is not balanced by ice discharge, and the ice stream is growing progressively thicker.

There is evidence that the adjacent Ice Stream B has slowed significantly over the last decade, and this may be an early indication that this fast-moving ice stream is about to enter a period of stagnation similar to that of Ice Stream C. Indeed, these large ice streams flowing from West Antarctica into Ross Ice Shelf may oscillate between periods of relative stagnation and major activity. During active periods, large areas of ice shelf thicken and run aground on seabed to form extensive “ice plains” in the mouth of the ice stream. Ultimately, these become too large to be pushed seaward by the ice stream, which then slows down and enters a period of stagnation. During this period, the grounding line of the ice plain retreats, as we observe today in the mouth of Ice Stream C, because nearby ice shelf, no longer compressed by ice-stream motion, progressively thins. At the same time, water within the deformable till beneath the ice starts to freeze on to the base of the ice stream, and snow accumulation progressively increases the ice thickness. A new phase of activity would be initiated when the increasing gravity potential of the ice stream exceeds the total resistance of the shrinking ice plain and the thinning layer of deformable till at the bed. This could occur rapidly if the effects of the shrinking ice plain outweigh those of the thinning (and therefore stiffening) till. Otherwise, the till layer would finally become completely frozen, and the ice stream would have to thicken sufficiently to initiate significant heating by internal deformation, followed by basal melting and finally saturation of an adequate thickness of till; this could take some thousands of years.

We assess how the propagation of high-frequency elastic-flexural waves through an ice shelf is modified by the presence of spatially periodic crevasses. Analysis of the normal modes supported by the ice shelf with and without crevasses reveals that a periodic crevasse distribution qualitatively changes the mechanical response. The normal modes of an ice shelf free of crevasses are evenly distributed as a function of frequency. In contrast, the normal modes of a crevasse-ridden ice shelf are distributed unevenly. There are ‘band gaps’, frequency ranges over which no eigenmodes exist. A model ice shelf that is 50 km in lateral extent and 300 m thick with crevasses spaced 500 m apart has a band gap from 0.2 to 0.38 Hz. This is a frequency range relevant for ocean-wave/ice-shelf interactions. When the outermost edge of the crevassed ice shelf is oscillated at a frequency within the band gap, the ice shelf responds very differently from a crevasse-free ice shelf. The flexural motion of the crevassed ice shelf is confined to a small region near the outermost edge of the ice shelf and effectively ‘blocked’ from reaching the interior.

Records of the time variation of the terminus position of Icelandic glaciers since 1700 show clear responses to the little ice age and to the warm period from 1930 to 1960. These data are used to deduce limits for the response time of the glaciers. The response time turns out to be of the order of one or two hundred years. This is much shorter than the “long response time” of Nye’s kinematic wave theory.

Climate warming makes an increasing thin-ice fraction likely to occur in the Arctic, underpinning the need for its regular observation. synchronous helicopter-borne measurements of the sea-ice thickness and like-polarized L-band radar backscatter carried out along identical flight tracks north of svalbard during winter are combined to develop an algorithm to estimate the thin-ice thickness solely from the L-band backscatter co-polarization ratio (LCPR). Airborne ice-thickness and LCPR data are smoothed along track (to reduce noise), co-located and compared. A linear and a logarithmic fit are applied using thickness values between 0.0 and 0.6m and 0.0 and 1.0 m, respectively. The thin-ice thickness is derived from the LCPR data using these fits, first for dependent data (used to obtain the fits) and subsequently for independent data. The results are compared to airborne ice-thickness measurements for ice-thickness values between 0.0 and 0.6m using linear regression. The logarithmic fit gives the most reliable results, with a correlation of 0.72 and a rms difference of 8 cm. It permits us to derive the thickness of thin ice (below 50–60cm thickness) from airborne LCPR data with an uncertainty of about 10 cm.

During February and March 2004, Satellite-tracked ice beacons and helicopter-borne Sensors collected ice-drift and ice-thickness data from the Southern Gulf of St Lawrence, Canada, to Study the region’s ice-thickness evolution and ice-drift behavior in response to winter Storms. Three northeasterly Storms passed through the area during the observation period, pushing the pack ice against the north Shore of Prince Edward Island. The resulting Severe ice deformation caused major changes in the ice-thickness distribution of two pack-ice areas tracked by ice beacons that Survived the Storms. The ice drift ranged from 1.4% to 2.9% of the wind Speed during free ice-drift conditions, decreasing to 0% when the pack ice compacted against the Shoreline. Most of the thinner ice deformed first, increasing the mean ice thickness over 6–8 km line Sections around the beacons from 0.6 and 0.3 m before the Storms to 1.9 and 2.0 m after the Storms. The ice-thickness increases can be accounted for by the reduced pack-ice area due to ice ridging. Over the next 4weeks, deformation continued and the mean ice thickness around the beacons increased to 2.8 m, well in excess of the maximum undeformed possible ice growth of 65 cm. Ice charts captured the ice thickness of undeformed and composite ice floes but did not capture the ice volume in ice-rubble fields.

The term ‘risk’ can be defined as the probability of unfavourable consequences or negative effects. Risk can be expressed by means of various indices, such as collective or social risk (possible number of dead), individual risk (probability of a person’s death within a certain territory during 1 year), probability of losses, etc. This paper is a case study of the small-scale assessment and mapping of individual avalanche risk focused on the two regions of Russia with the highest levels of avalanche activity: the northern Caucasus and the mountainous parts of Sakhalin island. The basic indices applied for individual avalanche risk estimation are: recurrence interval of avalanches (avalanche frequency), percentage of the whole investigated territory that is occupied by avalanche-prone areas, duration of avalanche danger period, probability of a person’s stay in an avalanche-prone area during 1 day (24 hours) and during 1 year, total population of the area and its density. The results of individual avalanche risk assessment, undertaken for the territory of Russia as a whole, show that its values generally do not exceed the admissible level (from 1×10–6 to 1×10–4). However, some areas of the northern Caucasus, including famous alpine skiing resorts (Krasnaya Poliana, Dombai, the Mount Elbrus region, etc.), and of Sakhalin, including the environs of towns (Kholmsk, Nevel’sk) and other smaller human settlements, are characterized by an unacceptable level of risk. In the aggregate, areas with an unacceptable (>1×10–4) level of individual avalanche risk comprise about 7% of the whole avalanche-prone territory of the northern Caucasus, those with an admissible level comprise 52% and those with an acceptable level (<1×10–6) 41%. The corresponding values for Sakhalin are 0.1%, 14.8% and 85.1%.

A new man-portable drill designed to perform in ice with entrained sand and rock has been built. Designated the ‘Koci drill’, it was first used on rock-covered glaciers in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica, during the 2006/07 field season. This drill is designed to be disassembled into component parts no heavier than 30 kg (not including the generator). For stability, the drill platform weight can be augmented with available rock. The field performance of the drill was generally good and both ice and rock were successfully penetrated and acceptable-quality ice cores up to 1 m long were collected during the 2007/08 season. The maximum depth achieved was 10.25 m. Given a concentrated effort at one or two sites per season, a depth of 40 m is achievable. Problems encountered in the field will be addressed in the next-generation design.

The glacier inventory in Chile covers all the arid north of the country (18° to 33° S) and the central part down to the lake district (33° to 41° 30′ S) except for the Río Maule and Río Itata basins (35° to 37° S). The most glaciated region of Chile is Patagonia, characterized by a wet climate, but glacier data are lacking over vast areas of this region. A total area of 5515 km2 has been inventoried in Chile; this does not include Hielo Patagónico Sur (southern Patagonia ice field), by far the largest glaciated area in Chile with an area of 13000km2, part of which is in Argentina. Including the uninventoried giaciers of Maule, Itata and Patagonia, the total glaciated area in Chile is estimated to be 201715 km2.

Information on glacier variations in the north of Chile is very scarce. In the central and south-central parts, and especially in Patagonia where glacier variations have been most studied, there is ample evidence for general glacier retreat from a neoglacial maximum, although a few glacier advances have been reported. The generalized retreat might be a result of tropospheric warming observed in the second half of the 20th century.

The Finnish Meteorological Institute has installed image-capturing devices on some Baltic Sea coastal radars for operational sea-ice monitoring and ice product validation. These devices produce radar images, which are saved operationally at about every 2 min. These data can efficiently be utilized in automated tracking of ice motion over sequences of radar images. Reliable estimates of point-wise ice drift can be used as virtual drifter buoys to validate fine-scale ice models. For this purpose we have developed an algorithm, which first locates objects that can reliably be recognized from one radar image to another, and then tracks the motion of these objects until they are lost by the algorithm. The recognizable objects in the first image of an image sequence are located by requiring an object to include a textural content, i.e. the object does not solely consist of a uniform area, and detected edge corner points. The corner points are required to exclude straight linear edges. After locating a suitable number of traceable objects, the tracking is performed between each pair of successive images using a two-resolution phase-correlation algorithm. We have tested the tracking algorithm using image sequences of two coastal radars collected during the 2010/11 and 2011/12 winters.

In deep ice-coring, as in many other disciplines, a winching system is involved in the overall operation of the drilling activities. The need to efficiently store the cable on the winch drum is well recognized, and the ‘orthocyclically wound’ approach is often used. This is accomplished by means of a ‘Lebus groove’, along with a level winding scheme of some description. The level wind is usually implemented in one of several ways using some mechanism to synchronize the position of the level wind with the point where the cable meets the winch drum. A novel method using a feedback control system is presented in this paper, introducing a virtually error-free approach to the surprisingly difficult task of level winding.

Observed and reconstructed snow-cover duration data from stations covering southern Canada, the Great Plains, the former Soviet Union and China were used to reconstruct spring snow-covered area over North America (NA) and Eurasia from 1915 to 1985. A combination of nine regions from NA and five from Eurasia were able to explain 81% and 67%, respectively, of the variance in satellite-derived sprint; snow-covered area (SCA) for each continent. The results suggested sprint; SCA had decreased significantly in Eurasia this century, but there was no evidence of a similar long-term decrease in NA spring SCA. Considerable caution should be used when interpreting these results because of the short period of calibration, and because of the less-than-optimal distribution of station data. Nonetheless, the reconstructed results are consistent with observed spring-temperature trends, which show a significant increase over Eurasia, but none Over NA.

Ice surface roughness is a parameter of importance to many glaciological studies. Surface roughness, a derivative of microtopography, provides the high-resolution information necessary to characterize morphological types of ice surfaces and complements satellite data in investigations of surface features across scale. There has been a gap in observational scale between high-resolution satellite data, aircraft data and analyses at microscopic scale, the latter investigating material properties rather than micromorphology. To fill this gap, we designed and built the Glacier Roughness Sensor (GRS), a towed instrument that collects surface roughness data mechanically in swath-survey style with 0.1 m along-track spacing, 0.2 m across-track spacing, and sub-centimeter accuracy for areas typically 100 m by 175 m. As a result of this instrument development, the variable ice surface roughness has been added as a geophysical observable in the study of glaciers and ice sheets. The method utilized for analysis of GRS surface roughness data is geostatistical classification employing a range of parameters extracted from vario functions, which are generalized spatial structure functions. In a seasonal comparison of data from spring (May 1997) and summer (late July 1999), characteristic parameters of the spring and summer ice surface were calculated, and, as a result, an answer to the morphogenetic question of ice surface processes could be derived: in this part of the Jakobshavn Isbræ drainage basin, ice-surface structures develop in an interplay of ablation, refreezing, snowfall, wind and (distant) crevassing, each process yields characteristically different components of the surface structure, and ablat ion is the dominant morphogenetic process.

A detailed survey has been made of outlet glaciers between longitudes 48°E and 62°E. Surface and bedrock profiles were constructed from radio echo-sounding data and glacier grounding lines were located by changes in the characteristics of bedrock echoes. A preliminary investigation of the dynamics of these fast-moving (~1 km a−1) glaciers is presented. From the measurements, the ice-mass flux through each glacier can be calculated. Mass-budget studies inland (Morgan and Jacka 1981) are thus extended to the coast. In the inland region, an excess of accumulation over outflow of ~100% was estimated, while a near balance condition appears likely for the coastal region

First, wind-tunnel experiments were carried out to measure the trajectories of saltating snow particles with varying friction velocity. Trajectories of saltating particles were recorded by a video system with a laser sheet and trajectory statistics, such as ejection and impact velocities and angles, were obtained for each particle. Parabolic trajectories are considerably elongated with an increase in the friction velocity; impact angle was approximately the same but ejection angle decreased with increasing friction velocity. Furthermore, it should be noted that the gradient of flux decay with height decreased with friction velocity. In the experiments, a snow-particle counter, which can sense not only the number of particles but also their diameters, was introduced. The flux distribution and the transport rate obtained as a function of the particle size gave a new insight into the relationship with the friction velocity.

Trajectories of saltating grains were computed, using the measurements of the initial ejection velocities, angles and the mean velocity profile of the air. The results agreed reasonably with our measurements. Using the measured probability distribution of the ejection velocities, an ensemble of trajectories was computed and thence the vertical profiles of stream-wise fluxes. The exponential decay of the flux on height was obtained in all cases and it supports the basic validity of the model, although agreement is less than expected.

Ice-core drilling and ice-core analysis (electrical conductivity–salinity, 18O, 3H, density) reveal that the internal structure of the west Ward Hunt Ice Shelf contrasts sharply with that of the east ice shelf. The west ice shelf contains a great thickness (≥22 m) of sea ice (mean salinity, 2.22‰; mean δ18O, -0.8‰), whereas the east ice shelf is entirely of meteoric or fresh-water ice (mean salinity 0.01‰; mean δ18O, -29.7‰). High tritium activities are found only in ice from near the bottom of the east and west ice shelves. The contrasting ice-core data is considered to be a proxy record of variations in water circulation and bottom freezing beneath the ice shelf. The west shelf is underlain by sea water flowing into Disraeli Fiord. Sea ice accretes on to the bottom of the west ice shelf from the sea-water flowing into the fiord. Sea-water flowing out of the fiord is directed below the east ice shelf. However, the east ice shelf is not underlain directly by sea-water but by a layer of fresh water from the surface of Disraeli Fiord. In this region, ice growth resulting from the presence of this stable fresh-water layer has been accompanied by surface ablation over a period of perhaps the last 450 years. As a result, fresh-water ice has completely replaced any sea ice that originally grew in the region of the east ice shelf. Whereas the west and east shelves are underlain almost exclusively by sea-water and fresh water, ice in the south shelf is the result of freezing of fresh, brackish or sea water. This is attributed to mixing of the inflowing and outflowing waters.

An ice core was extracted from the Zangser Kangri (ZK) ice field in the northern Tibetan Plateau (NTP), a location with limited instrumental and proxy records. In this paper, we present a continuous high–resolution dust concentration time series spanning the period AD 1951-2008 to investigate variations in atmospheric dust loading over the NTP. The results show that atmospheric dust loading exhibited significant decadal variations, with two periods of high dust loading (AD 1959–67 and AD 1979–89) and three periods of relatively low loading (AD 1951-58, AD 1968–78 and AD 1990–2008). The variability of atmospheric dust loading was related to wind speed at 500 hPa over the dust source regions. The winter Arctic Oscillation (AO) index showed a significant negative correlation with the annual dust concentration, implying a possible connection between the winter AO and the atmospheric dust loading over the NTP.

The authors have developed an experimental device in a cold laboratory with the purpose of measuring optical parameters of natural snow depending on grain-size, impurity content and density. Snow samples were prepared from homogeneous layers in order to measure the radiative properties of clearly identified snow types. The first part of this paper describes the working assumptions and the experimental device. In the second part, experiment results are described and discussed. We have compared albedo measurements of different natural snow types with theoretical values derived from physical optics, based on Mie scattering. The albedo evolution of three different snow types submitted to temperature-gradient metamorphism is analyzed.