A first-ever look at ice stream formation

Scientists have captured the birth of a high-speed ice stream for the first time on top of a Russian glacier.


In a remote archipelago of the Russian Arctic, Vavilov Ice Cap had been moving at a glacial pace for decades. Then, in 2013, it suddenly started spewing ice into the sea, flowing in what scientists call a glacial surge. But a new study suggests this surge has now become something entirely different.


The authors of a new study published in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters have documented what they believe is the first observation of a transition from a glacial surge to a longer-lasting flow called an ice stream. This video shows satellite imagery of the ice stream flow during summer 2015, spring 2016, spring 2017, and summer 2018.

Ice streams and glacial surges were believed to be separate phenomena driven by different mechanisms. But if the authors of the new study are correct, glacial surges could instead be an early stage of an ice stream. If surging ice can form an ice stream on a glacier like Vavilov, then other ice caps might also experience similar rapid ice loss, said Whyjay Zheng, a Ph.D. candidate at Cornell University and the lead author of the new study.


“If that's true, we probably have to revise our predictions for the impact of global sea level rise in the future,” he said.


From the time the surge at Vavilov began in 2013 until the spring of 2019, the ice cap lost 9.5 billion tons of ice, or 11 percent of the ice mass of the entire glacier basin.


Ice streams have been documented before in Greenland and Antarctica, where the ice sheets tend to be larger and their flow less constrained by bedrock features. To see an ice stream in a smaller ice cap like Vavilov would be unusual and perhaps unprecedented, according to the study’s authors. And as far as the researchers know, no one has observed one being formed.

“If you look at the satellite images, it seems like the entire west wing of the ice cap is just dumping into the sea,” Zheng said. “No one has ever seen this before.”


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Read the original research paper detailing the findings here:

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