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Schroeder DM, Blankenship DD, Young DA, et al. Evidence for elevated and spatially variable geothermal flux beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2014;111(25):9070-2doi: 10.1073/pnas.1405184111.
Schroeder, D. M., Blankenship, D. D., Young, D. A., & Quartini, E. (2014). Evidence for elevated and spatially variable geothermal flux beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 111(25), 9070-2. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1405184111
Schroeder, Dustin M, et al. "Evidence for elevated and spatially variable geothermal flux beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America vol. 111,25 (2014): 9070-2. doi: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1405184111
Schroeder DM, Blankenship DD, Young DA, Quartini E. Evidence for elevated and spatially variable geothermal flux beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2014 Jun 24;111(25):9070-2. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1405184111. Epub 2014 Jun 09. PMID: 24927578; PMCID: PMC4078843.
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Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2014 Jun 24;111(25):9070-2. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1405184111. Epub 2014 Jun 09.

Evidence for elevated and spatially variable geothermal flux beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

Dustin M Schroeder, Donald D Blankenship, Duncan A Young, Enrica Quartini

Affiliations

  1. Institute for Geophysics, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78758 [email protected].
  2. Institute for Geophysics, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78758.

PMID: 24927578 PMCID: PMC4078843 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1405184111

Abstract

Heterogeneous hydrologic, lithologic, and geologic basal boundary conditions can exert strong control on the evolution, stability, and sea level contribution of marine ice sheets. Geothermal flux is one of the most dynamically critical ice sheet boundary conditions but is extremely difficult to constrain at the scale required to understand and predict the behavior of rapidly changing glaciers. This lack of observational constraint on geothermal flux is particularly problematic for the glacier catchments of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet within the low topography of the West Antarctic Rift System where geothermal fluxes are expected to be high, heterogeneous, and possibly transient. We use airborne radar sounding data with a subglacial water routing model to estimate the distribution of basal melting and geothermal flux beneath Thwaites Glacier, West Antarctica. We show that the Thwaites Glacier catchment has a minimum average geothermal flux of ∼ 114 ± 10 mW/m(2) with areas of high flux exceeding 200 mW/m(2) consistent with hypothesized rift-associated magmatic migration and volcanism. These areas of highest geothermal flux include the westernmost tributary of Thwaites Glacier adjacent to the subaerial Mount Takahe volcano and the upper reaches of the central tributary near the West Antarctic Ice Sheet Divide ice core drilling site.

Keywords: ice-penetrating radar; subglacial hydrology

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