Brownbag Talks

A regional look beneath the West Antarctic Ice Sheet using airborne radar sounding

Duncan Young
UTIG Research Science Associate V, Ph.D.

SEMINAR OVERIEW:
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is the only marine based ice sheet to have survived the end of the last Ice Age.  It contains the equivalent of six meters sea level rise, and as such its collapse would have major societal impact.  A major control on the potential decay of this ice sheet are the properties of the ice-rock interface. This work has motivated an extensive program of airborne geophysics to examine the bed, including measurements of gravity and magnetic fields, laser altimetry, and the focus of this talk, radar sounding through the ice.  The University of Texas at Austin has led this effort. Here we report on ongoing work using radar sounding. We examine basal roughness at scales of kilometers to tens of meters to evaluate the hypothesis that the different behaviors of West Antarctic glaciers are a function of their bed configuration.  New coherent sounding methods, for the first time, now allow imaging of fine scale subglacial structures, further clarifying the nature of the bedrock interface.