Session Announcement and Call for Abstracts
Subglacial Environments of Ice Sheets and Glaciers
European Geosciences Union, General Assembly
Vienna, Austria
19-24 April 2009
Financial Support Application Deadline: Sunday, 7 December 2008
Abstract Submission Deadline: Tuesday, 13 January 2009
For further information, please go to:
http://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU2009/session/350
Or contact:
Robert Bingham
Email: rgbi [at] bas.ac.uk
Organizers of the European Geosciences Union General Assembly announce a
call for abstracts and the "Subglacial Environments of Ice Sheets and
Glaciers" session. The General Assembly will be held 19-24 April 2009,
in Vienna, Austria. The financial support application for young
scientists is due Sunday, 7 December 2008. The regular abstract
submission deadline is Tuesday, 13 January 2009. For further information
on the session, please go to:
http://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU2009/session/350.
Session Description:
Subglacial environments are some of the least accessible regions on
Earth and represent one of the last physical frontiers of glaciological
research. They are both unique ecological habitats and key components in
the dynamic behavior of ice sheets and glaciers. They are also complex,
being characterized by precise mass and energy transfers between the ice
and its substrate of water, air, bedrock, or sediment, and the oceans at
the boundaries of ice sheets. In particular, determining the
distribution and nature of water flows at the ice-mass bed is
increasingly recognized as key to understanding and predicting ice
dynamics. For example, a growing number of remote sensing and
ground-based observations across Antarctica and Greenland are
highlighting the existence of subglacial water in a variety of forms,
ranging from vast subglacial lakes (providing distinctive habitats for
potentially unique life forms) to mm-thick water flows at the
ice-substrate interface. Feedbacks between increased surface melting,
glacier bed conditions and ice flow also affect alpine glaciers,
potentially contributing to increased glacial retreat in low and
mid-latitude mountain regions. Overall, it is clear that subglacial
processes have a great impact on ice dynamics, transcending all scales
of ice mass from valley glaciers to large ice sheets, and contribute
through feedback loops to changes in sea level, ocean circulation, and
regional and global climate evolution. Characterizing basal environments
quantitatively, therefore, remains an outstanding glaciological problem,
as does scaling of this knowledge for use in modeling ice sheet and
glacier behavior.
Session organizers invite scientific contributions that include, but are
not limited to, measurements and/or modeling of:
1) Flow of subglacial water at the bed and through subglacial sediments;
2) Linkages between subglacial hydrology and ice dynamics;
3) Theoretical-, field-, or laboratory-based parameterization of
subglacial processes in numerical ice-flow models;
4) Formation, geometry, and potential hydrological linkages between
subglacial lakes;
5) Subglacial and supraglacial lake drainage and subglacial floods from
ice margins; and
6) Geomorphological evidence of subglacial water flows from
contemporary ice-sheet margins and across formerly glaciated
continental-scale regions.
The session is being chaired by:
Robert Bingham, British Antarctic Survey; Stefan Vogel, Northern
Illinois University; Helen Amanda Fricker, Scripps Institution of
Oceanography; and Bryn Hubbard, Aberystwyth University.
For further information about the session and to submit an abstract,
please go to:
http://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU2009/session/350
Or contact:
Robert Bingham
Email: rgbi [at] bas.ac.uk
The financial support application for young scientists is due Sunday,
7 December 2008.
The regular abstract submission deadline is Tuesday, 13 January 2009.