Subglacial soft bed hydrology and climate change
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Water at the glacier base controls the ‘slipperiness’ of the bed and the rate of glacier contribution to sea level rise, yet very little is known about this process associated with soft bedded glaciers. There is a continuum between distributed and channelized systems, associated with soft bedded glaciers, which have a distinct seasonal velocity pattern observable in remote sensing data. We use this pattern, combined with instrumented data to identify the subglacial hydrology of ten Icelandic glaciers with proglacial lakes. We then use different climate scenarios to predict the future subglacial hydrology in 2050 and 2100. We show that today ~ 80% of glaciers have a distributed drainage, but by 2050 this will decrease to ~ 50%, and by 2100 rise again to ~ 60%. In this way we can record a change in effective pressure, with implications for ice sheet modeling and the rate of sea level rise over the next century.
