Ocean contributes to the melting of the Jakobshavn Glacier front

Abstract

The Jakobshavn Glacier (JG) in Greenland is one of the most active glaciers in the world. It was close to balance before 1997 but this was followed by a sudden transition to rapid thinning. The reason for the change remains unclear. In this study, The NASA Pre-IceBridge ice thickness data are collected to monitor the melting of JG front. The surface elevation decreased by around 90 m from 1995 to 2002 on the floating front. A distributed energy balance model is developed to estimate the energy balance of JG front in the past 30 years (1986–2016). The results indicate that multi-year average energy fluxes absorbed by the floating front of JG from the ocean were about 500 W m−2 from 1986 to 2016. This is approximately two times of the energy fluxes from atmosphere during the same period. The energy fluxes from the ocean increased from 200 to 600 W m−2 during the period from 1990 to 1998 while energy fluxes from the atmosphere remained stable at about 250 W m−2. These results demonstrate that ocean contributes more to the melting of the JG front, and suggest that bottom surface melting must have a profound influence on marine terminating glacier dynamics.