Ice Front Changes on the Greenland Ice Sheet: 1992-2005

Remote sensing techniques now allow us to compare ice front positions over many years for the entire Greenland Ice Sheet. We have used satellite image mosaics from 1992, 2000, and 2005 to examine changes in the ice front positions of Greenland's outlet glaciers. While ice front changes on individual glaciers have been studied in Greenland, this research is more comprehensive, looking at all outlet glaciers with width exceeding 3 km (>150 glaciers). By using a GIS platform to store and digitize the images, we were able to easily compare temporal changes among ice fronts. Overall, the trend is toward retreat from 1992-2005 with more enhanced retreat occurring in 2000-2005, during which the average summer temperatures were notably higher than the 1992-2000 timeframe. The enhanced ice front retreat we see during the later period may be linked to these higher summer temperatures. These results for retreat also point toward areas of potential dynamical interest in light of the link others have found between glacier geometry and ice velocity.