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Flow Studies on an Antarctic Glacier

Hi Brandon- this is Michael Wing (Finland '09) - you helped train me in Fairbanks. My question is, how fast is the Bryd Glacier supposed to be moving, and do you think it is speeding up? Does this research have anything to do with global warming? In other words, what's at stake here? Because I had always understood that the WEST Antarctic ice sheet was considered unstable & vulnerable to global warming but that the East Antarctic ice sheet is "stable." True?

Sat, 11/20/2010 - 11:30

Brandon Gillette

Hi Michael! Great to hear from you!Satellite and remote sensing estimates have Byrd Glacier moving approximately 800 meters per year. This is actually quite fast, though not nearly as fast as some of the glaciers in Greenland. There have not been long terms studies done on Byrd so it is really hard to tell at this time whether or not it has been accelerating. That's one of the things we are attempting to find out over the next 3 years. While we are not directly looking at indicators of global warming, glacier acceleration has been one of those signs that people point to as evidence.
Byrd Glacier is the second largest glacier on the planet and has been neglected of sorts when studying glacier flow dynamics. I don't have specifics at hand but you are correct that the most unstable of the ice is located in West Antarctica. Byrd Glacier drains from a large catchment basin in East Antarctica through the Transantarctic Mountains into the Ross Ice Shelf. Therefore it's one of those links between the two. We'll be back in February to retrieve our units and start the data processing. It will be very interesting to see our findings and how they play into the field of glacier flow dynamics.