the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
| 28 Jan 2025
Seasonal evolution of the subglacial hydrologic system beneath the western margin of the Greenland Ice Sheet inferred from transient speed-up events
Abstract. The transport of meltwater from the surface to the bed of the Greenland Ice Sheet is well understood to result in elevated surface velocities, although this relationship remains poorly resolved on a seasonal scale. Transient speed-ups associated with supraglacial lake drainages, which generally occur in the early- to mid-summer melt season, have been studied in detail. However, the connection between basal hydrology and ice dynamics is less well understood in the late melt season, after most lakes have ceased draining and meltwater input to the bed is through widely distributed moulins. Here, we use a Global Positioning System (GPS) array to investigate transient speed-up events in response to runoff across the 2011 and 2012 melt seasons and use these data to infer the evolution of subglacial conditions beneath the ice sheet in western Greenland. We find no relationship between the magnitude of runoff and the amplitude of speed-up events; we do observe a general trend of increasing velocity responses and decreasing variability in the velocity response across the GPS array as the melt season progresses. Early-season velocity transients (frequently associated with lake drainages) produce highly variable speed-up and pronounced uplift across the array. Late-season events produce longer, higher amplitude, and more uniform velocity responses, but do not produce large or coherent uplift patterns. We interpret our results to imply that by the late melt season, most subglacial channels and/or connective flow pathways between cavities are closing or have closed, sharply lowering basal transmissivity. At the same time, moulins formed throughout the melt season remain open, producing pervasive and widely distributed surface-to-bed pathways. The result is that small magnitude runoff events can rapidly supply meltwater to the bed and overwhelm the subglacial system, decreasing frictional coupling. This response contrasts with early-season runoff events when surface-to-bed pathways are not yet open, and therefore, similarly small magnitude runoff events do not have the same impact. Finally, we show that due to their extended duration and amplitude, late-season events accommodate a larger fraction of the annual ice motion than lake drainages but their net influence on ice sheet motion remains small (2–3 % of annual displacement).
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RC1: 'Comment on egusphere-2024-3700', Anonymous Referee #1, 24 Feb 2025
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Gjerde et al., identify 13 transient speed-up events in the North Lake region of west Greenland during the 2011 and 2012 melt seasons, and characterize the velocity response of each event to understand how the subglacial drainage system evolves over the course of the melt season. They find no relationship between the magnitude of runoff and amplitude of speed-up events, but do identify a general trend of larger velocity responses as the melt season progresses. In particular, they distinguish between the velocity response to rapid supraglacial lake drainage events and longer duration melt events. Finding that in the late melt season, melt events can have an outsized influence on ice velocity. The manuscript is very well written, well reasoned, and addresses an important research question regarding the evolution of the subglacial drainage system, while emphasizing late season melt events. I have a number of minor comments, questions, and suggestions that are included below.
Regarding the 2011/238 event and the calculated runoff, have the authors look into if there are other factors to consider in their runoff estimate such as precipitation (rainfall) that occurred over this period to contribute to the larger velocity response?
L70: The following citation would should be added in describing the limited role of conduit growth during lake drainages: Dow, C. F., Kulessa, B., Rutt, I. C., Tsai, V. C., Pimentel, S., Doyle, S. H., As, D. Van, Lindbäck, K., Pettersson, R., Jones, G. a., & Hubbard, A. L. (2015). Modeling of subglacial hydrological development following rapid supraglacial lake drainage. Journal of Geophysical Research : Earth Surface, 120, 1127–1147. https://doi.org/10.1002/2014JF003333
L113: What is the ice thickness here?
L118: What is the baseline distance from KAGA?
L122: Only 14 stations are shown in Fig 1, where is the 15th?
L113-122: What is the uncertainty in the GPS station positions? (Horizontal and vertical)
L180: I suggest including the drainage basin outline in the study area figure.
L245: Do you mean 168.85 is the end date for the pre-speed-up event? It looks like that date corresponds to the beginning of the orange bar in Figure 5. What is the start date for the pre-speed-up event velocity determination? It does not appear to be at the beginning of the x-axis shown in Figure 5 due to the location of the blue bars (calculated values) with respect to recorded velocities in that window (particularly at stations NL01, NL02, and NL06.
L290/Figure 7: Symbology on y-axis does not match text where the subplots are refereed to as normalized
L318: Andrews et al., 2014 did not use in situ observations to show that channelization could account for decreasing velocities in the early melt season because they were only able to instrument moulins (to monitor the channelized system) during the middle of the melt season (between doy190-200 of each year) in mid-July.
L323: weakly-connected cavities are not “low-water pressure” because the channelized drainage system operates at lower pressures than even drained or hydraulically connected cavities. I suggest rephrasing to something like “these dewatered cavities maintain lower pressures than isolated cavities” or similar.
Fig 1: (a): The font size for the scale bar is too small to read. (b,d): What is the rationale for cutting off the x-axis bound on the date indicated? The last speed-up/melt event is close to that date so does it represent the end of the melt season or is there more variability after this point? (B,C) would benefit from the addition of the velocity at each individual station (in thin lines) that is then overlaid by the blue average line shown. This may be too visually cluttered and if so, I would appreciate a larger version in the supplement with this information as I am curious if some stations have a consistently lower amplitude or higher amplitude response to the melt events.
L183: Could other moulins not be identified from satellite imagery (or field observations) to remove this area from the drainage basin?
L216: melt events should be labeled in Figure 1 (or colored to correspond with in-text citation), this would make it easier for the reader to reference the figures from within the text.
Figure 2: I suggest labeling the GPS stations to more easily compare with other figures (e.g., Figs 4,5). Also, this figure includes more stations than are included in the study area Figure 1.
Figure 3: It would be helpful to emphasize the longer duration of the x-axis in subplots b and d for event 2011/238 by making the axis length scale the same as in plot a. I understand the purpose of the plot is to compare the displacement magnitude, however, it could be misleading to readers. At minimum I would suggest adding in daily minor tick marks to the x-axis in b&d.
Figure 4: The text within the figure is very difficult to read, consider increasing the font size and using a black rather than grey. (Same comment for Fig 5). I am not sure what stations or locations subplot label FL03 are referring to, a station with this name is not included in Figure 1 (maybe the 15th missing station?)
Figure 5: What is the length of time used to determine Vpre in this figure? From the figure it appears that it is <1 day of data, however, I think it is longer considering the methodology. I suggest extending the x-axis to show the full velocity window used to determine the Vpre value. I am not sure what stations or locations subplot label FL03 are referring to.
Figure 9: The axis for NL09 is different from the others, consider making them all uniform for an easy visual comparison of station response.
Figure 11: Great figure, I am glad this analysis and visualization was included in the manuscript.
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-3700-RC1 -
RC2: 'Comment on egusphere-2024-3700', Anonymous Referee #2, 05 Mar 2025
reply
Summary:
Gjerde et al. compare the dynamic response from a draining supraglacial lake to those of multiple runoff-induced speed-up events throughout the melt season to infer the seasonal evolution of the subglacial drainage system. They do this by using vertical and horizontal displacement from a GPS array and apply a Network Inversion Filter to characterize the dynamic responses. The main findings are that (1) there is no relationship between the magnitude of runoff and amplitude of speed-up events, (2) as the melt season progresses speed-up amplitude increases, becomes more spatially uniform and results in smaller uplift when compared to early to mid-melt season supraglacial drainage events. The authors attribute this change in dynamic response to the seasonal evolution of the subglacial drainage system. (3) Late-season melt-induced speed-up events are responsible for more of the annual ice motion than supraglacial lake drainages for their site in 2011 and 2012.
Major comments:
The manuscript is generally well written, with clear figures and mostly sound analyses. However, I believe there are a few issues that currently limit this study’s impact and novelty.
Firstly, I think the analysis of the correlation between runoff and speed-up magnitude in Section 3.3 could be improved. It is unsurprising that there is no correlation between runoff magnitude and speed-up magnitude, as it is the preceding melt conditions which “define” how much runoff the subglacial drainage system can accommodate (e.g., Hoffman et al. 2011). Hence why we see large dynamic responses from “spring-events” or supraglacial lake drainages, as they provide a large input of meltwater relative to the preceding period. This has been well established (e.g., Bartholomew et al., 2010; Hoffman et al. 2011; Schoof 2010). A suggestion would be to shift the focus away from runoff magnitude (mean, max and total) and instead focussing on rate of change of runoff or runoff variations from preceding conditions to the melt event and/or estimated lake drainage meltwater volume. I believe this is especially important, as currently the lack of a relationship between runoff magnitude and speed-up magnitude is one of the main findings, and this is already well known/ established.
In its current form, the novelty of the study is limited, as numerous previous studies have used GPS-derived ice velocities to infer changes in the subglacial drainage system as the melt season progresses. The data and methods have also been previously reported on, and I do not think this study provides new inferences about the subglacial drainage system evolution by applying the data, in the way that it does, to look at differences between melt-induced and lake drainage speed-up events. The main aspect of this the study which could provide new insights on the evolution of the subglacial drainage system compared to previous studies, is the use of a dense array of GPS stakes. This setup enables the examination of spatial variability in the dynamic response to melt events, which has been looked at in this study. However, the analysis of this aspect is currently limited and could be expanded upon to make it the main purpose.
Minor comments:
I don’t quite follow how you have compared the magnitude of runoff from the late-season melt events to the magnitude of meltwater delivered to the bed from the lake drainage. The meltwater flowing through the system during the late-season melt event will be the runoff from the calculated surface catchment, plus all the runoff entering the subglacial system upstream of this (especially as you state the events last multiple days). The runoff is likely higher than you estimate, but still less instantaneous than the lake drainage. (L203)
The structure and coherence of the writing in the manuscript could be tighter. Currently, there is a lot of repetition of the main findings and introduction paragraphs throughout (e.g., L92-101, L309-306). To improve the readability and impact, the ideas presented in the discussion could be also be condensed.
I am slightly confused how Section 4.2 in the discussion fits into the rest of the manuscript, as it seems to come out of nowhere.
Title: For consistency with the manuscript and other literature, perhaps “subglacial hydrologic system” can be changed to “subglacial drainage system”.
L19: Change “transients” to “transient speed-up events” or similar
L23: I’m not sure I follow what you mean by “basal transmissivity” here, can you instead say “increasing basal friction” or similar. Also, the reason for the large magnitude speed-up during this time of year, is the reduced capacity of the subglacial drainage system to “handle” this sudden extra melt, not the fact that an increase in basal friction has led to lower ice velocities. Perhaps these sentences could be rephrased to make this clearer.
L45: Change “ice-sheet” to “basal”?
L46: Here and multiple other times you use “basal/subglacial” “drainage/hydrologic” interchangeably. Can you please stick to just one? I suggest just using “subglacial drainage system”.
L56-60: This sentence is quite long and hard to read, can it be rephrased?
L70: Could you provide a timescale for creep closure of subglacial channel closure (e.g., from Chandler et al., 2013)? It will help with the interpretation in your discussions
L78: With no evidence, you can’t be sure they are an “order-of-magnitude smaller” so perhaps remove. The main differences are the rate of meltwater delivery between the two.
L89: Can you state the distance from the terminus?
L91: I know that the NIF is described in the methods, but because it is not a commonly used method, perhaps brief detail on what it does could be added here, e.g., “we use a NIF to infer basal slip…”
L97: Rephrase “ice-response indicators”
L101: This sentence is largely a repeat of what has previously been said in this paragraph. I wonder if this paragraph can be cut down, and instead changed to focus on what your objectives are. L92-101 currently reads more like a conclusion.
L101: The literature review provided in the introduction is clear, but I would suggest also referencing Schmidt et al. 2023 and Hoffman et al. 2011, which are currently not in the reference list but are two very relevant papers to this study.
L175: What is the timestep of the RACMO data, hourly or daily?
L181: Change “points” to “grid cells”
L181: Surely you need to calculate the sum of all grid cells in the catchment to get a measure of the total runoff entering the subglacial system?
L190: Change “total” to “integrated” to keep consistent with your plots, or vice-versa
L218: The phrase “plotted relative to the onset of the speed-up event” is confusing as it sounds like you have plotted basal slip relative to the timing of the speed-up onset. I believe you have actually plotted it relative to the basal slip before the event? Although in the caption for figure 2 you state that it is the maximum basal slip of each event? Please can you improve the clarity of this sentence and the caption of Figure 2.
L261-268: This paragraph is a repeat of the previous two and could be omitted
L276: Can you just say “average delta V” here and throughout to make it easier for the reader to follow? And perhaps rephrase “does not exceed” as you are referring to an average not individual data points.
L311: Delete “Recently,”
L336: I am not sure you can be confident the volume of meltwater is less, just that the delivery is less instantaneous than during a hydro-fracture lake drainage.
L337: Again, I think it is the variation in meltwater delivery to the bed that is important here, not the total runoff/drainage volume
L344: It would be good here to give a measure of the amount of runoff in the preceding period before the speed-up event, as this is the most important factor in inducing the dynamic response. Additionally, do you have an estimate for the ice thickness under the GPS array – it would be helpful to add this information to your introduction.
Important to highlight that the runoff drops close to zero for a prolonged period before the late-season melt event. Basically, a spring event but with an established supraglacial drainage system.
L347: I would argue that the subglacial drainage efficiency is a result of the preceding runoff magnitude. Please provide a reference(s) for the hypothesis you are referring to.
L354: Can you clarify what you mean by the “style” of runoff delivery? Is this supraglacial lake drainage vs normal runoff routing through moulins?
L340: Change “basal” to “subglacial”
L385: This study does not report on annual ice motion at North Lake
L391-407: The conceptual model presented here is largely a repeat of models that have already been established (e.g., Hoffman et al. 2016; Davison et al. 2019), so I question whether this paragraph and Fig. 8 provides anything new and is necessary?
L392: Change Figure 8 to Fig. 8?
L402: Remove “ice sheet” as the processes you are describing here are specific to your site (lake drainages)
L409-413: I’m not sure if there is anything novel added here.
L460: I’m not sure these results provide “preliminary insights”, with many previous studies reporting on the evolution of the subglacial drainage system in this area.
L461-463: This sentence is hard to read at present, can it be rephrased?
L471: Isn’t this just because there are more of them?
L680 (Figure 2): It is difficult to distinguish the black GPS triangles from the black arrows, perhaps you could use a different colour?
Figure 1: Please add lat/lon coordinates to the border of (a) and other figures where appropriate. Change y-axis of (d and e) to Daily runoff (mm w.e.). Change units in (b) and (c) to m year-1. This and for all figures change “a)” to “(a)”.
Figure 6: I find Figure 6 somewhat hard to interpret. I believe the point of this figure is to relate change in velocity of speed-up events to the mean runoff of the event, the maximum runoff of the event and the total runoff of the event. All of which show little or no correlation. I wonder whether comparing the change in velocity to all of the mean, total and max runoff is necessary. What seems lacking is the comparison to the change in runoff, as this is the main factor that causes the speed-up (see Hoffman et al. 2011)
Figure 8: Can you make the figure labels (a, b, etc) bigger, they are currently hard to read.
Figure 10: Here and throughout change “m/year” to m year-1 or m yr-1. Please add coordinates to map border.
Figure 11: Please increase font size of figure labels, scale bar and legend in b. Please can you move the figure labels to the left of each plot.
References:
Bartholomew, I., Nienow, P., Mair, D., Hubbard, A., King, M. A., & Sole, A. (2010). Seasonal evolution of subglacial drainage and acceleration in a Greenland outlet glacier. Nature Geoscience, 3(6), 408–411. https://doi.org/10.1038/ngeo863
Davison, B. J., Sole, A. J., Livingstone, S. J., Cowton, T. R., & Nienow, P. W. (2019). The Influence of Hydrology on the Dynamics of Land-Terminating Sectors of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Frontiers in Earth Science, 7. Retrieved from https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/feart.2019.00010
Hoffman, M. J., Catania, G. A., Neumann, T. A., Andrews, L. C., & Rumrill, J. A. (2011). Links between acceleration, melting, and supraglacial lake drainage of the western Greenland Ice Sheet. Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface, 116(F4). https://doi.org/10.1029/2010JF001934
Hoffman, M. J., Andrews, L. C., Price, S. F., Catania, G. A., Neumann, T. A., Lüthi, M. P., et al. (2016). Greenland subglacial drainage evolution regulated by weakly connected regions of the bed | Nature Communications. Nature Communications, 7(1), 13903. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms13903
Schoof, C. (2010). Ice-sheet acceleration driven by melt supply variability. Nature, 468(7325), 803–806. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature09618
Schmid, T., Radić, V., Tedstone, A., Lea, J. M., Brough, S., & Hermann, M. (2023). Atmospheric drivers of melt-related ice speed-up events on the Russell Glacier in Southwest Greenland. The Cryosphere Discussions, 1–32. https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-2023-1
Tedstone, A. J., Nienow, P. W., Gourmelen, N., Dehecq, A., Goldberg, D., & Hanna, E. (2015). Decadal slowdown of a land-terminating sector of the Greenland Ice Sheet despite warming. Nature, 526(7575), 692–695. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature15722
Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-3700-RC2
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