Ice Flow Along AN Iagp Flow Line, Wilkes Land, Antarctica (Abstract only)

Abstract

Trilateration and single line surveys have been made to about 900 km inland of Casey, Wilkes Land, to measure surface elevation, ice thickness, horizontal velocity, and other parameters. On the large scale the velocity U increases smoothly from 8 m a⁻¹, 800 km inland, to 280 m a⁻¹ inland of the fast outlet streams. This increase in velocity is associated with a corresponding increase in the large-scale smoothed (over about 30 ice thicknesses) basal shear stress τb from 0.4 to 1.5 bar. The mean shear strain-rate through the ice sheet U/Z = k_τb⁴ , where Z is the ice thickness (range 4 500 to 1 700 m).

At scales of one to several ice thicknesses large variations occur in surface slope and ice thickness without proportionally large velocity variations, because of the effect of the longitudinal stress. Detailed measurements made over a 30 km section indicated that the surface longitudinal strain-rate gradient varied from -1.7 to +1.3×l0⁻⁶ a⁻¹ m⁻¹ along with variations in surface slope of from -3.5 to +1.5%.

A multilayer model, based on the solution of the biharmonic equation for the stream function, was used in a study of the ice flow associated with these surface undulations. Given the bedrock topography and large-scale flow parameters, the model closely predicted the measured surface profile when the variation of the surface accumulation rate over an undulation was also considered.