Environmental Science and Engineering Seminar

The Greenland Ice Sheet is currently one of the largest contributors to barystatic sea level rise, in part because surface melting has steadily increased over the last two decades. However, quantifying how surface melt translates into mass loss is challenging, since at least half of all surface melt is permanently or temporarily retained inside the ice sheet in porous snow or fractured ice. In this talk, I will show how we are using radar remote sensing to image these englacial water systems and capture their evolving storage capacity in the face of extreme weather events and long-term atmospheric warming. Our ice-sheet scale observations demonstrate that the competing effects of atmospheric forcing and ice dynamics produce significant regional diversity in Greenland's near-surface water systems, with notable impacts for regional mass balance.