Department Seminar: Lu An

Title: Changed and unchanged phenomena in East Antarctica from earlier satellite record and Chinese airborne data

Abstract: Wilkes Land and Totten Glacier (TG) in East Antarctica (EA) have been losing ice mass significantly since 1989. There is a lack of knowledge of long-term mass balance in the region which hinders the estimation of its contribution to global sea level rise. Here we show that this acceleration trend in TG has occurred since the 1960s. We reconstruct ice flow velocity fields of 1963-1989 in TG from the first-generation satellite images of ARGON and Landsat-1 & 4, and build a five decade-long record of ice dynamics. We find a persistent long term ice discharge rate of 68 ± 1 Gt/y and an acceleration of 0.17 ± 0.02 Gt/y 2  from 1963 to 2018, making TG the greatest contributor to global sea level rise in EA. In the meanwhile, with Chinese airborne ice penetrating radar data, we extract grounding line information from the Lambert-Amery glacier system. From 53 radar survey lines, we identified 137 grounding points. In general, the result demonstrates the feasibility of ice-penetrating radar in confirming grounding line positions while adding significant information regarding basal conditions and processes such as marine ice formations and basal crevasses.

In the seminar, I will also briefly discuss my collaborative research with Polar Research Institute of China on subglacial lakes in East Antarctica, and my potential Antarctic field work.