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Supplementary material to “Context for the Recent Massive Petermann Glacier Calving Event”

5 April 2011

Kelly K. Falkner, College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, Oregon State University, Corvallis

Humfrey Melling, Institute of Ocean Sciences, Fisheries and Oceans Canada, Sidney, British Columbia, Canada

Andreas M. Münchow, College of Earth, Ocean, and Environment, University of Delaware, Newark

Jason E. Box, Byrd Polar Research Center, Ohio State University, Columbus

Trudy Wohlleben, Canadian Ice Service, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Helen L. Johnson, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

Preben Gudmandsen, Danish National Space Institute, Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby, Denmark

Roger Samelson, Oregon State University, Corvallis

Luke Copland, Department of Geography, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Konrad Steffen, Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, Boulder, Colorado

Eric Rignot, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena

Anthony K. Higgins, Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, Copenhagen, Denmark

Citation:

Falkner, K. K., et al. (2011), Context for the recent massive Petermann Glacier calving event, Eos Trans. AGU, 92(14), 117–118, doi:10.1029/2011EO140001. [Full Article (pdf)]

Figure S1. The Petermann Gletscher is the largest floating ice tongue in the Northern Hemisphere. As the 15-km wide floating ice tongue squeezes past the near-vertical fjord walls, shearing occurs and the floating ice tongue break along rifts. A number of ice rifts can be seen in this Landsat Enhanced Thematic Mapper satellite image from July 2001. The rifts are covered with thin marine ice (up to a few meters in thickness) and they collectively weaken the ice tongue. Usually, large iceberg calving occurs along these rifts, once they migrate with the ice flow toward the seaward ice front. The approximate location of the ice margin (calving front) following the large break-up event in August 2010 is shown by the dashed line.

Table S1: Image Sources for Ice Frontal Positions in Figure 1

Note: There are a number of publications that focus on icebergs in southern Baffin Bay and the Labrador Sea that are purported to have originated in the Petermann Fjord. We have not treated these reports here due to ambiguity in ascribing source.

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