Mapping Antarctic grounding lines from Cryosat-2

Abstract:

The grounding zone (GZ) of the Antarctic ice sheet is a critical boundary for assessing the mass of ice leaving the continent and the stability (or lack thereof) of the inland, grounded ice sheet. It marks the transition between ice that can contribute to sea level and that which already has. Ice shelf basal melt rates are a maximum close the GZ and can have an important influence on inland flow. Changes in the position of the GZ for an ice stream resting on a bed with a retrograde slope (deepening inland) can provide an early warning of an instability in flow or state transition. Several methods exists to monitor the GZ, however, to date, there has been no method for routinely and regularly monitoring the GZ, nor any method that can be applied unambiguously across its entirety around Antarctica.
The CryoSat-2 mission provides year-round coverage of the ice sheets, at a high spatial resolution. On the Antarctic ice shelves, the 369 day repeat period of the observations leads to aliasing of tidal motion induced by ocean tides, resulting in distinct patterns in the CryoSat-2 elevation measurements. Here, we focus on the Filchner-Ronne ice shelf to demonstrate the potential of the Cryosat-2 observations to map the GZ, and compare our results with existing GZ estimates.