In: Cold Regions Science and Technology, 2019, vol. 165, p. 102788
The warming climate is changing the surface dynamics of the Greenland Ice Sheet, including the balance between snowfall and melt. Increasing surface melt impacts the structure of the relatively porous near-surface layer known as firn. Camp Century, a base abandoned in 1967, now comprises a subsurface debris field within the firn in Northwest Greenland. We collected 80 km of 100 or 250 MHz...
|
In: The Cryosphere, 2019, vol. 13, no. 3, p. 845–859
The perennial snow, or firn, on the Greenland ice sheet each summer stores part of the meltwater formed at the surface, buffering the ice sheet’s contribution to sea level. We gathered observations of firn air content, indicative of the space available in the firn to retain meltwater, and find that this air content remained stable in cold regions of the firn over the last 65 years but...
|
In: Frontiers in Earth Science, 2018, vol. 6, p. -
The surface snow density of glaciers and ice sheets is of fundamental importance in converting volume to mass in both altimetry and surface mass balance studies, yet it is often poorly constrained. Site-specific surface snow densities are typically derived from empirical relations based on temperature and wind speed. These parameterizations commonly calculate the average density of the top...
|
In: Geophysical Research Letters, 2016, vol. 43, no. 15, p. 8091–8096
In 1959 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built Camp Century beneath the surface of the northwestern Greenland Ice Sheet. There they studied the feasibility of deploying ballistic missiles within the ice sheet. The base and its wastes were abandoned with minimal decommissioning in 1967, under the assumption they would be preserved for eternity by perpetually accumulating snowfall. Here we show...
|