Decadal slowdown of a land-terminating sector of the Greenland Ice Sheet during sustained climate warming - implications for wider ice sheet hydrology-dynamics coupling

Abstract:

The relationship between surface melting and ice motion will affect how the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) responds to climate and the structure of the subglacial drainage system may be crucial in controlling how changing melt-rates impact ice motion. Ice sheet motion varies over seasonal time-scales in response to varying surface meltwater inputs to the ice-sheet bed which lubricate the ice-bed interface, resulting in periods of faster ice motion. However, the impact of hydro-dynamic coupling on ice motion over decadal timescales remains poorly constrained. Here we utilise remotely-sensed optical Landsat imagery to generate a record of annual motion spanning three decades extending back to 1985. Our observations cover an ∼8000 km² area along ∼170 km of predominantly land-terminating margin of the west GrIS, and extend ∼50 km inland to 1100 m asl. We find that that annual ice motion was 12% slower in 2007–2014 compared to 1985–1994, despite a corresponding 50% increase in surface meltwater production. Less than 1/3 of the observed slowdown can be explained by a reduction in internal deformation caused by marginal ice sheet thinning, and we therefore hypothesise that increases in subglacial drainage efficiency, associated with sustained larger melt volumes, have reduced basal lubrication resulting in slower ice flow. Our findings suggest that hydro-dynamic coupling in this section of the ablation zone resulted in net ice motion slowdown over decadal timescales — not speedup as previously postulated. Increases in meltwater production from projected climate warming may therefore further reduce the motion of land-terminating margins of the ice-sheet indicating such margins are more resilient to the dynamic impacts of enhanced meltwater production than previously thought. The implications of these observations for wider ice sheet hydrology-dynamics coupling are considered.