Haxilegen Glacier No.51 (43.731°N, 84.391°E; CN5Y741C0051) is located in the Kuytun river basin, Erenharbirga range, eastern Tien Shan. This study presents the annual mass balance of Haxilegen Glacier No.51 for 7 hydrological years and uses a temperature-index and an accumulation model to reconstruct the annual mass balance from 1999 to 2015. The model is calibrated against annual altitudinal mass-balance measurements and then applied to the period with no measurements. We find an accumulated mass balance of −6.06 ± 0.88 m w.e.a−1 over the period of 16 hydrological years, with an average annual value of −0.32 ± 0.22 m w.e.a−1. The mean glacier-wide annual, summer and winter balances for 1999 to 2015 are −0.37, −0.54 and 0.16 ± 0.22 m w.e.a−1, respectively, with a high correlation coefficient (r = 0.95, p < 0.001) between annual balance and summer balance. The calculated mass-balance sensitivity of the glacier to temperature is −0.51 m w.e.a−1 °C−1 and to precipitation is 0.08 m w.e.a−1 for a 10% increase. The sensitivity of seasonal mass balance indicates that temperature during the melt season (May–August) and annual precipitation are the major contributors to mass-balance fluctuation.

Over recent decades, Greenland ice sheet surface melt has shown an increase both in intensity and spatial extent. Part of this water probably reaches the bed and can enhance glacier speed, advecting a larger volume of ice into the ablation area. In the context of a warming climate, this mechanism could contribute to the future rate of thinning and retreat of land-terminating glaciers of Greenland. These changes in ice flow conditions will in turn influence surface crevassing and thus the ability of water to reach the bed at higher elevations. Here, using a coupled basal hydrology and prognostic ice flow model, the evolution of a Greenland-type glacier subject to increasing surface melt is studied over a few decades. For different scenarios of surface melt increase over the next decades, the evolution of crevassed areas and the ability of water to reach the bed is inferred. Our results indicate that the currently observed crevasse distribution is likely to extend further upstream which will allow water to reach the bed at higher elevations. This will lead to an increase in ice flux into the ablation area which, in turn, accelerates the mass loss of land-terminating glaciers.

The thermal state at the bed of a large ice sheet is a critical boundary condition governing its future evolution. Radar surveys provide an opportunity for direct but remote observation of the ice-sheet bed, and therefore offer a means of constraining numerical ice-sheet models at the ice–bed interface. Here we have processed results of radar surveys of the Greenland Ice Sheet undertaken by the Program for Arctic Regional Climate Assessment (PARCA) between 1999 and 2003, to explore this opportunity. We consider the robustness of the measurements in the context of uncertain dielectric losses in the ice sheet, concluding that the observed radar signal characteristics reflect the character of the bed itself rather than that of uncertain englacial absorption. However, the identification of thaw is restricted to areas where subglacial water has sufficient depth to influence the radar reflection. We derive a map of inferred areas of subglacial thaw, and compare our results with other studies predicting regions with temperate bed. We show that in many areas the radar inferences of ponded water lie within areas predicted to be thawed by modelling and radiostratigraphy. There is clear disagreement in certain areas, suggesting the presence of high geothermal flux anomalies.

Ice shelves play an important role in buttressing land ice from reaching the sea, thus restraining the rate of grounded ice loss. Long-period gravity-wave impacts excite vibrations in ice shelves that can expand pre-existing fractures and trigger iceberg calving. To investigate the spatial amplitude variability and propagation characteristics of these vibrations, a 34-station broadband seismic array was deployed on the Ross Ice Shelf (RIS) from November 2014 to November 2016. Two types of ice-shelf plate waves were identified with beamforming: flexural-gravity waves and extensional Lamb waves. Below 20 mHz, flexural-gravity waves dominate coherent signals across the array and propagate landward from the ice front at close to shallow-water gravity-wave speeds (~70 m s−1). In the 20–100 mHz band, extensional Lamb waves dominate and propagate at phase speeds ~3 km s−1. Flexural-gravity and extensional Lamb waves were also observed by a 5-station broadband seismic array deployed on the Pine Island Glacier (PIG) ice shelf from January 2012 to December 2013, with flexural wave energy, also detected at the PIG in the 20–100 mHz band. Considering the ubiquitous presence of storm activity in the Southern Ocean and the similar observations at both the RIS and the PIG ice shelves, it is likely that most, if not all, West Antarctic ice shelves are subjected to similar gravity-wave excitation.

We have developed a two-dimensional coupled glacier–fjord model, which runs automatically using Elmer/Ice and MITgcm software packages, to investigate the magnitude of submarine melting along a vertical glacier front and its potential influence on glacier calving and front position changes. We apply this model to simulate the Hansbreen glacier–Hansbukta proglacial–fjord system, Southwestern Svalbard, during the summer of 2010. The limited size of this system allows us to resolve some of the small-scale processes occurring at the ice–ocean interface in the fjord model, using a 0.5 s time step and a 1 m grid resolution near the glacier front. We use a rich set of field data spanning the period April–August 2010 to constrain, calibrate and validate the model. We adjust circulation patterns in the fjord by tuning subglacial discharge inputs that best match observed temperature while maintaining a compromise with observed salinity, suggesting a convectively driven circulation in Hansbukta. The results of our model simulations suggest that both submarine melting and crevasse hydrofracturing exert important controls on seasonal frontal ablation, with submarine melting alone not being sufficient for reproducing the observed patterns of seasonal retreat. Both submarine melt and calving rates accumulated along the entire simulation period are of the same order of magnitude, ~100 m. The model results also indicate that changes in submarine melting lag meltwater production by 4–5 weeks, which suggests that it may take up to a month for meltwater to traverse the englacial and subglacial drainage network.

We investigate the appropriateness of calving or crevasse models from the literature using linear elastic fracture mechanics (LEFM). To this end, we compare LEFM model-predicted stress intensity factors (SIFs) against numerically computed SIFs using the displacement correlation method in conjunction with the finite element method. We present several benchmark simulations wherein we calculate the SIF at the tips of water-filled surface and basal crevasses penetrating through rectangular ice slabs under different boundary conditions, including grounded and floating conditions. Our simulation results indicate that the basal boundary condition significantly influences the SIF at the crevasse tips. We find that the existing calving models using LEFM are not generally accurate for evaluating SIFs in grounded glaciers or floating ice shelves. We also illustrate that using the ‘single edge crack’ weight function in the LEFM formulations may be appropriate for predicting calving from floating ice shelves, owing to the low fracture toughness of ice; whereas, using the ‘double edge crack’ or ‘central through crack’ weight functions is more appropriate for predicting calving from grounded glaciers. To conclude, we recommend using the displacement correlation method for SIF evaluation in real glaciers and ice shelves with complex geometries and boundary conditions.

We have mapped the full crystallographic orientation of sea ice using electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD). This is the first time EBSD has been used to study sea ice. Platelet ice is a feature of sea ice near ice shelves. Ice crystals accumulate as an unconsolidated sub-ice platelet layer beneath the columnar ice (CI), where they are subsumed by the advancing sea–ice interface to form incorporated platelet ice (PI). As is well known, in CI the crystal preferred orientation comprises dominantly horizontal c-axes, while PI has c-axes varying between horizontal and vertical. For the first time, this study shows the a-axes of CI and PI are not random. Misorientation analysis has been used to illuminate the possible drivers of these alignments. In CI the misorientation angle distribution from random pairs and neighbour pairs of grains are indistinguishable, indicating the distributions are a consequence of crystal preferred orientation. Geometric selection during growth will develop the a-axis alignment in CI if ice growth in water is fastest parallel to the a-axis, as has previously been hypothesised. In contrast, in PI random-pair and neighbour-pair misorientation distributions are significantly different, suggesting mechanical rotation of crystals at grain boundaries as the most likely explanation.

Accurately estimating winter surface mass balance on glaciers is central to assessing glacier health and predicting glacier run-off. However, measuring and modelling snow distribution is inherently difficult in mountainous terrain. Here, we explore rigorous statistical methods of estimating winter balance and its uncertainty from multiscale measurements of snow depth and density. In May 2016, we collected over 9000 manual measurements of snow depth across three glaciers in the St. Elias Mountains, Yukon, Canada. Linear regression, combined with cross-validation and Bayesian model averaging, as well as ordinary kriging are used to interpolate point-scale values to glacier-wide estimates of winter balance. Elevation and a wind-redistribution parameter exhibit the highest correlations with winter balance, but the relationship varies considerably between glaciers. A Monte Carlo analysis reveals that the interpolation itself introduces more uncertainty than the assignment of snow density or the representation of grid-scale variability. For our study glaciers, the winter balance uncertainty from all assessed sources ranges from 0.03 to 0.15 m w.e. (5–39%). Despite the challenges associated with estimating winter balance, our results are consistent with a regional-scale winter-balance gradient.

Subglacial tills play an important role in glacier dynamics but are difficult to characterize in situ. Amplitude Variation with Angle (AVA) analysis of seismic reflection data can distinguish between stiff tills and deformable tills. However, AVA analysis in mountain glacier environments can be problematic: reflections can be obscured by Rayleigh wave energy scattered from crevasses, and complex basal topography can impede the location of reflection points in 2-D acquisitions. We use a forward model to produce challenging synthetic seismic records in order to test the efficacy of AVA in crevassed and geometrically complex environments. We find that we can distinguish subglacial till types in moderately crevassed environments, where ‘moderate’ depends on crevasse spacing and orientation. The forward model serves as a planning tool, as it can predict AVA success or failure based on characteristics of the study glacier. Applying lessons from the forward model, we perform AVA on a seismic dataset collected from Taku Glacier in Southeast Alaska in March 2016. Taku Glacier is a valley glacier thought to overlay thick sediment deposits. A near-offset polarity reversal confirms that the tills are deformable.

Despite their importance for mass-balance estimates and the progress in techniques based on optical and thermal satellite imagery, the mapping of debris-covered glacier boundaries remains a challenging task. Manual corrections hamper regular updates. In this study, we present an automatic approach to delineate glacier outlines using interferometrically derived synthetic aperture radar (InSAR) coherence, slope and morphological operations. InSAR coherence detects the temporally decorrelated surface (e.g. glacial extent) irrespective of its surface type and separates it from the highly coherent surrounding areas. We tested the impact of different processing settings, for example resolution, coherence window size and topographic phase removal, on the quality of the generated outlines. We found minor influence of the topographic phase, but a combination of strong multi-looking during interferogram generation and additional averaging during coherence estimation strongly deteriorated the coherence at the glacier edges. We analysed the performance of X-, C- and L- band radar data. The C-band Sentinel-1 data outlined the glacier boundary with the least misclassifications and a type II error of 0.47% compared with Global Land Ice Measurements from Space inventory data. Our study shows the potential of the Sentinel-1 mission together with our automatic processing chain to provide regular updates for land-terminating glaciers on a large scale.

Bed roughness is an important control on ice-stream location and dynamics. The majority of previous bed roughness studies have been based on data derived from radio-echo sounding (RES) transects across Antarctica and Greenland. However, the wide spacing of RES transects means that the links between roughness and flow are poorly constrained. Here, we use Digital Terrain Model/bathymetry data from a well-preserved palaeo-ice stream to investigate basal controls on the behaviour of contemporary ice streams. Artificial transects were set up across the Minch Palaeo-Ice Stream (NW Scotland) to mimic RES flight lines over Institute and Möller Ice Streams (Antarctica). We then explored how different data-resolution, transect orientation and spacing, and different methods, impact roughness measurements. Our results show that fast palaeo-ice flow can occur over a rough, hard bed, not just a smooth, soft bed, as previous work has suggested. Smooth areas of the bed occur over both bedrock and sediment covered regions. Similar trends in bed roughness values were found using Fast Fourier Transform analysis and standard deviation methods. Smoothing of bed roughness results can hide important details. We propose that the typical spacing of RES transects is too wide to capture different landform assemblages and that transect orientation influences bed roughness measurements in both contemporary and palaeo-ice-stream setting.

Information about the ice volume stored in glaciers is of high importance for sustainable water management in many arid regions of Central Asia. Several methods to estimate the ice volume exist. However, none of them take the specific characteristics of flat terminus debris-covered glaciers into account. We present a method for deriving spatially-distributed ice thickness for debris-covered dendritic glaciers, which are common not only in Central Tien Shan but also in several other mountain ranges in High Asia. The method relies on automatically generated branch lines, observed surface velocities and surface topographic parameters as basic input. Branch lines were generated using Thiessen polygons and Dijkstra's path algorithm. Ice thicknesses for four debris-covered glaciers – South Inylchek, Kaindy, Tomur and Koxkar glaciers – have been estimated along the branch line network solving the equation of laminar flow. For Koxkar and South Inylchek glaciers, respectively, maximum thicknesses of ~250 and 380 m were estimated. These results differ by ~50 m compared with GPR measurements with an uncertainty for the debris-covered parts of ~40%. Based on geodetic mass balances, we estimate that the investigated glaciers lost between 6 and 28% of their volume from 1975 to the early 2000s.