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Multiple melt plumes observed at the Breioamerkurjokull ice face in the upper waters of Jokulsarlon lagoon, Iceland

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journal contribution
posted on 2017-07-07, 08:55 authored by Mark A. Brandon, Richard HodgkinsRichard Hodgkins, H. Bjornsson, Jon Olafsson
Breioamerkurjokull flows from the Vatnajokull ice cap and calves into the Jokulsarlon proglacial lagoon. The lagoon is connected to the North Atlantic Ocean through a 6 m deep narrow channel. Four hydrographic surveys in spring 2012, and a 2011 4-month long temperature and salinity time series of lagoon inflow show that the lake has significantly changed since 1976. Warm saline ocean water enters each tidal cycle and descends below the maximum sampled depths. The lagoon has a surface layer of ice melt, freshwater and Atlantic derived water. Beneath 10 m depth an advective/diffusive balance is responsible for determining the temperature and salinity of the lagoon waters down to ~90 m. To maintain the observed hydrographic structure, we calculate an upwelling of deep water of ~0.2 m d−1. A survey within 30 m of Breioamerkurjokull showed that the warmest and most saline waters sampled within the lagoon below 10 m depth were adjacent to the glacier face, along with multiple interleaved warm and cold layers. A heat and salt balance model shows that submarine melting along the ice face generates multiple meltwater plumes that are mixed and diluted within 200 m of the ice face.

Funding

Financial support for fieldwork was provided by the Open University, the School of Social, Political and Geographical Sciences, Loughborough University and by the Percy Sladen Memorial Fund, Linnean Society of London.

History

School

  • Social Sciences

Department

  • Geography and Environment

Published in

Annals of Glaciology

Volume

58

Issue

74

Pages

131-143

Citation

BRANDON, M.A. ... et al, 2017. Multiple melt plumes observed at the Breioamerkurjokull ice face in the upper waters of Jokulsarlon lagoon, Iceland. Annals of Glaciology, 58(74), pp. 131-143.

Publisher

Cambridge University Press (CUP) © The Author(s)

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/

Acceptance date

2017-04-24

Publication date

2017-06-14

Copyright date

2017

Notes

This is an Open Access Article. It is published by Cambridge University Press under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence (CC BY). Full details of this licence are available at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

ISSN

1727-5644

Language

  • en