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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.

 

Knowledge of Antarctica's sedimentary basins builds our understanding of the coupled evolution of tectonics, ice, ocean, and climate. Sedimentary basins have properties distinct from basement‐dominated regions that impact ice‐sheet dynamics, potentially influencing future ice‐sheet change. Despite their importance, our knowledge of Antarctic sedimentary basins is restricted. Remoteness, the harsh environment, the overlying ice sheet, ice shelves, and sea ice all make fieldwork challenging. Nonetheless, in the past decade the geophysics community has made great progress in internationally coordinated data collection and compilation with parallel advances in data processing and analysis supporting a new insight into Antarctica's subglacial environment. Here, we summarize recent progress in understanding Antarctica's sedimentary basins. We review advances in the technical capability of radar, potential fields, seismic, and electromagnetic techniques to detect and characterize basins beneath ice and advances in integrated multi‐data interpretation including machine‐learning approaches. These new capabilities permit a continent‐wide mapping of Antarctica's sedimentary basins and their characteristics, aiding definition of the tectonic development of the continent. Crucially, Antarctica's sedimentary basins interact with the overlying ice sheet through dynamic feedbacks that have the potential to contribute to rapid ice‐sheet change. Looking ahead, future research directions include techniques to increase data coverage within logistical constraints, and resolving major knowledge gaps, including insufficient sampling of the ice‐sheet bed and poor definition of subglacial basin structure and stratigraphy. Translating the knowledge of sedimentary basin processes into ice‐sheet modeling studies is critical to underpin better capacity to predict future change.

 

The expansion of refrozen ice slabs in Greenland's firn may enhance meltwater runoff and increase surface mass loss. However, the impermeability of ice slabs and the pathways for meltwater export from these regions remain poorly characterized. Here, we present ice‐penetrating radar observations of extensive meltwater infiltration and refreezing beneath ice slabs in Northwest Greenland. We show that these buried ice complexes form where supraglacial streams or lakes drain through surface crevasses into relict firn beneath the ice slabs. This suggests that the firn can continue to buffer mass loss from surface meltwater runoff and limit meltwater delivery to the ice sheet bed even after ice slabs have formed. Therefore, a significant time lag may exist between the initial formation of ice slabs and the onset of complete surface runoff and seasonal meltwater drainage to the subglacial system in interior regions of the ice sheet.

 

Sea-level rise projections rely on accurate predictions of ice mass loss from Antarctica. Climate change promotes greater mass loss by destabilizing ice shelves and accelerating the discharge of upstream grounded ice. Mass loss is further exacerbated by mechanisms such as the Marine Ice Sheet Instability and the Marine Ice Cliff Instability. However, the effect of basal thermal state changes of grounded ice remains largely unexplored. Here, we use numerical ice sheet modeling to investigate how warmer basal temperatures could affect the Antarctic ice sheet mass balance. We find increased mass loss in response to idealized basal thawing experiments run over 100 years. Most notably, frozen-bed patches could be tenuously sustaining the current ice configuration in parts of George V, Adélie, Enderby, and Kemp Land regions of East Antarctica. With less than 5 degrees of basal warming, these frozen patches may begin to thaw, producing new loci of mass loss.

 

Jupiter’s moon Europa is a prime candidate for extraterrestrial habitability in our solar system. The surface landforms of its ice shell express the subsurface structure, dynamics, and exchange governing this potential. Double ridges are the most common surface feature on Europa and occur across every sector of the moon, but their formation is poorly understood, with current hypotheses providing competing and incomplete mechanisms for the development of their distinct morphology. Here we present the discovery and analysis of a double ridge in Northwest Greenland with the same gravity-scaled geometry as those found on Europa. Using surface elevation and radar sounding data, we show that this double ridge was formed by successive refreezing, pressurization, and fracture of a shallow water sill within the ice sheet. If the same process is responsible for Europa’s double ridges, our results suggest that shallow liquid water is spatially and temporally ubiquitous across Europa’s ice shell.

 

The Amundsen Sea Embayment of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet contains Thwaites and Pine Island Glaciers, two of the most rapidly changing glaciers in Antarctica. To date, Pine Island and Thwaites Glaciers have only been observed by independent airborne radar sounding surveys, but a combined cross‐basin analysis that investigates the basal conditions across the Pine Island‐Thwaites Glaciers boundary has not been performed. Here, we combine two radar surveys and correct for their differences in system parameters to produce unified englacial attenuation and basal relative reflectivity maps spanning both Pine Island and Thwaites Glaciers. Relative reflectivities range from −24.8 to +37.4 dB with the highest values beneath fast‐flowing ice at the ice sheet margin. By comparing our reflectivity results with previously derived radar specularity and trailing bed echoes at Thwaites Glacier, we find a highly diverse subglacial landscape and hydrologic conditions that evolve along‐flow. Together, these findings highlight the potential for joint airborne radar analysis with ground‐based seismic and geomorphological observations to understand variations in the bed properties and cross‐catchment interactions of ice streams and outlet glaciers.

 

Surface meltwater runoff dominates present-day mass loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet. In Greenland’s interior, porous firn can limit runoff by retaining meltwater unless perched low-permeability horizons, such as ice slabs, develop and restrict percolation. Recent observations suggest that such horizons might develop rapidly during extreme melt seasons. Here we present radar sounding evidence that an extensive near surface melt layer formed following the extreme melt season in 2012. This layer was still present in 2017 in regions up to 700 m higher in elevation and 160 km further inland than known ice slabs. We find that melt layer formation is driven by local, short-timescale thermal and hydrologic processes in addition to mean climate state. These melt layers reduce vertical percolation pathways, and, under appropriate firn temperature and surface melt conditions, encourage further ice aggregation at their horizon. Therefore, the frequency of extreme melt seasons relative to the rate at which pore space and cold content regenerates above the most recent melt layer may be a key determinant of the firn’s multi-year response to surface melt.

 

Abstract Ice-penetrating radar sounding is a powerful geophysical tool for studying terrestrial and planetary ice with a rich glaciological heritage reaching back over half a century. Recent years have also seen rapid growth in both the radioglaciological community itself and in the scope and sophistication of its analysis of ice-penetrating radar data. This has been spurred by a combination of growing datasets and improvements in computational resources as well as advances in radar sounding instrumentation and platforms. Together, these developments are transforming the field and highlight exciting paths forward for future innovation and investigation.