2011 the first complete glacier inventory for Eastern Greenland

Meltwater from glaciers and icecaps (GIC) provide a significant contribution to global sea-level rise, but estimates are uncertain due to the globally still incomplete information about glacier location and size, as well as large uncertainties in current Global Climate Models (GCMs). Recent studies that calculate global sea-level rise from GIC have developed simplified approaches using information from glacier inventories or gridded data sets and different GCMs. However, for several strongly glacierized regions very rough assumptions about the ice distribution have to be made and an urgent demand for a globally complete glacier inventory data is expressed. The GIC on Greenland are one of these regions. Within the "EU-funded" project ice2sea we map the Eastern part of Greenland using Landsat ETM imagery acquired around the year 2000 and the ASTER GDEM to derive topographic parameters and drainage divides. Up to now more than 5500 GIC with a total area of about 26.000 square km have been mapped between 62 degrees and 80 degrees N considering only glaciers with an area larger than 0.1 square km that have no direct connection to the ice sheet. The largest valley glaciers are often debris covered, whereas smaller and mountain glaciers are often shaded due to the steep topography. Seasonal snow hiding the real glacier perimeter is a problem in some of the scenes that can only be solved by using scenes with better snow conditions. The artifacts in the GDEM are locally rather severe, but for the GIC considered for this inventory they were manageable. A comparison with the outline of the Greenland ice sheet as used in current models revealed that along the eastern coast a considerable amount of the local GIC is included in the extent of the ice sheet.