Abstract

The Müller Ice Cap will soon set the scene for a new drilling project. Therefore, ice thickness estimates are necessary for planning since thickness measurements of the ice cap are sparse. Here, two models are presented and compared, i) a simple inversion of the shallow ice approximation (SIA inversion) by the use of a single radar line in combination with the glacier outline, surface slope, and elevation, and ii) an iterative inverse method using the Parallel Ice Sheet Model (PISM). The two methods mostly agree about a good drill site candidate. However, the new semi-empirical SIA inversion is insensitive to mass balance, computationally fast, and provides better fits.

Highlights

  • The Müller Ice Cap (MIC), located on Axel Heiberg Island in Arctic Canada, is facing a part of the Arctic Ocean, where no full depth ice core has been drilled, scientists at University of Manitoba and University of Copenhagen intend to do exactly this

  • After solving the least squares regression of the SIA inversion using the Operation IceBridge (OIB) ice thicknesses, the parameters a, b, and k are applied in combination with the surface slope and ice flux over the entire domain to move from one to two dimensions

  • The drill site candidate suggested here should be taken with caution, as further in-situ measurements of ice thickness, surface melt, and surface elevation are highly recommended

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Summary

Introduction

The Müller Ice Cap (MIC), located on Axel Heiberg Island in Arctic Canada, is facing a part of the Arctic Ocean, where no full depth ice core has been drilled, scientists at University of Manitoba and University of Copenhagen intend to do exactly this. The MIC remains poorly studied with the exception of a few mass balance (Koerner, 1979; Thomson et al, 2011) and surface velocity studies (van Wychen et al, 2014), leaving the ice thickness poorly constrained. Field work constraints make it impractical and expensive to survey the entire ice cap, and it is necessary to be clever when deciding where to conduct ground based radar measurements

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