Ice Sheet Stratigraphy Can Constrain Basal Slip

Abstract:

Basal slip is an important component of ice sheet mass flux and dynamics. Basal slip varies over time due to variations in basal temperature, water pressure, and sediment cover. All of these factors can create coherent patterns of basal slip that migrate over time. Our knowledge of the spatial variability in basal slip comes from inversions of driving stress, ice thickness, and surface velocity, but these inversions contain no information about temporal variability. We do not know if the patterns in slip revealed by those inversions move over time. While englacial stratigraphy has classically been used to constrain surface accumulation and geothermal flux, it is also sensitive to horizontal gradients in basal slip. Here we show that englacial stratigraphy can constrain the velocity of basal slip patterns.

Englacial stratigraphy responds strongly to patterns of basal slip that move downstream over time close to the ice sheet velocity. In previous work, we used a thermomechanical model to discover that thermally controlled slip patterns migrate downstream and create stratigraphic structures, but we were unable to directly control the pattern velocity, as that arose naturally out of the model physics. Here, we use a kinematic flowline model that allows us to directly control pattern velocity, and thus is applicable to a wide variety of slip mechanisms in addition to basal temperature. We find that the largest and most intricate stratigraphic structures develop when the pattern moves at the column-average ice velocity. Patterns that move slower than the column-average ice velocity produce overturned stratigraphy in the lower part of the ice sheet, while patterns moving at the column-average eventually cause the entire ice sheet to overturn if they persist long enough. Based on these forward models, we develop an interpretive guide for deducing moving patterns in basal slip from ice sheet internal layers. Ice sheet internal stratigraphy represents a potentially vast untapped source of information on basal sliding.