摘要：Increased melting of marine-terminating glaciers of the Greenland Ice Sheet could lead to
unstable dynamic ice mass loss, further accelerating global sea level rise. To better
understand the historical context of the present-day widespread glacier front retreat, we
mapped frontal positions for two years, 1994 and 2017, for 146 and 251 major outlet
glaciers, respectively. Front position locations were identified using optical remote sensing
imagery from the Landsat 5 (1994) and Landsat 8 (2017) satellites. Of the fronts surveyed,
we find that 86% retreated between 2017 and 1994 and 62% retreated between 2017 and
2015, when the most recent glacial front positions were recorded. In addition, ice surface
elevation differences for four dynamically-thinning glaciers were calculated using data
collected from NASA’s Oceans Melting Greenland (OMG) mission in 2016 and 2017 by the
Glacier and Ice Surface Topography Interferometer (GLISTIN-A). In each case, ice surface
lowering was observed in excess of 10 m within the 10km-wide swath of GLISTIN-A near
the glacier front. This evaluation of glacier change advances our understanding of oceandriven
Greenland ice mass loss.
