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Abstract Adélie‐George V Land in East Antarctica, encompassing the vast Wilkes Subglacial Basin, has a configuration that could be prone to ice sheet instability: the basin's retrograde bed slope could make its marine terminating glaciers vulnerable to warm seawater intrusion and irreversible retreat under predicted climate forcing. However, future projections are uncertain, due in part to limited subglacial observations near the grounding zone. Here, we develop a novel statistical approach to characterize subglacial conditions from radar sounding observations. Our method reveals intermixed frozen and thawed bed within 100 km of the grounding‐zone near the Wilkes Subglacial Basin outflow, and enables comparisons to ice sheet model‐inferred thermal states. The signs of intermixed or near thawed conditions raises the possibility that changes in basal thermal state could impact the stability of Adélie‐George V Land, adding to the region's potentially vulnerable topographic configuration and sensitivity to ocean forcing driven grounding line retreat. 

Abstract. The crystal orientation fabric (COF) of ice sheets records the past history ofice sheet deformation and influences present-day ice flow dynamics. Though notwidely implemented, coherent ice-penetrating radar is able to detect bulkanisotropic fabric patterns by exploiting the birefringence of ice crystals atradar frequencies, with the assumption that one of the crystallographic axesis aligned in the vertical direction. In this study, we conduct a suite ofquad-polarimetric measurements consisting of four orthogonal antennaorientation combinations near the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divideice core site. From these measurements, we are able to quantify the azimuthalfabric asymmetry at this site to a depth of 1400 m at abulk-averaged resolution of up to 15 m. Our estimates of fabricasymmetry closely match corresponding fabric estimates directly measured fromthe WAIS Divide ice core. While ice core studies are often unable to determinethe absolute fabric orientation due to core rotation during extraction, we areable to identify and conclude that the fabric orientation is depth-invariantto at least 1400 m, equivalent to 6700 years BP (years before1950) and aligns closely with the modern surface strain direction at WAISDivide. Our results support the claim that the deformation regime at WAISDivide has not changed substantially through the majority of theHolocene. Rapid polarimetric determination of bulk fabric asymmetry andorientation compares well with much more laborious sample-based COFmeasurements from thin ice sections. Because it is the bulk-averaged fabricthat ultimately influences ice flow, polarimetric radar methods provide anopportunity for its accurate and widespread mapping and its incorporation intoice flow models. 

We analyze the temporal structure of the climatological seasonal cycle in surface air temperature across the globe. We find that, over large regions of Earth, the seasonal cycle of surface temperature departs from an annual harmonic: the duration of fall and spring differ by as much as 2 months. We characterize this asymmetry by the metric ASYM, defined as the phase lag of the seasonal maximum temperature relative to the summer solstice minus the phase lag of the seasonal minimum temperature relative to winter solstice. We present a global analysis of ASYM from weather station data and atmospheric reanalysis and find that ASYM is well represented in the reanalysis. ASYM generally features positive values over land and negative values over the ocean, indicating that spring has a longer duration over the land domain whereas fall has a longer duration over the ocean. However, ASYM also features more positive values over North America compared to Europe and negative values in the polar regions over ice sheets and sea ice. Understanding the root cause of the climatological ASYM will potentially further our understanding of controls on the seasonal cycle of temperature and its future/past changes. We explore several candidate mechanisms to explain the spatial structure of ASYM including 1) modification of the seasonal cycle of surface solar radiation by the seasonal evolution of cloud thickness, 2) differences in the seasonal cycle of the atmospheric boundary layer depth over ocean and over land, and 3) temperature advection by the seasonally evolving atmospheric circulation.