Shear margins in upper half of Northeast Greenland Ice Stream were established two millennia ago.

Only a few localised ice streams drain most of the ice from the Greenland Ice Sheet. Thus, understanding ice stream behaviour and its temporal variability is crucially important to predict future sea-level change. The interior trunk of the 700 km-long North-East Greenland Ice Stream (NEGIS) is remarkable due to the lack of any clear bedrock channel to explain its presence. Here, we present a 3-dimensional analysis of the folding and advection of its stratigraphic horizons, which shows that the localised flow and shear margins in the upper NEGIS were fully developed only ca 2000 years ago. Our results contradict the assumption that the ice stream has been stable throughout the Holocene in its current form and show that upper NEGIS-type development of ice streaming, with distinct shear margins and no bed topography relationship, can be established on time scales of hundreds of years, which is a major challenge for realistic mass-balance and sea-level rise projections.

Surface albedo measurements and surface type classification from helicopter-based observations during MOSAiC.

Global climate change poses significant societal and political challenges. The rapid increase in the near-surface air temperatures and the drastic retreat of the Arctic sea ice during summer are not well represented by climate models. The data sets introduced here intend to help improving the current understanding of the ongoing Arctic climate changes. In particular, this study considers observations from 24 helicopter flights (June-September 2020) and 5 flights with the helicopter-towed probe HELiPOD (May-July 2020) during MOSAiC. Distributions of various surface types (white ice/snow, bright melt ponds, dark melt ponds, open water, and bare ice) were determined using fisheye camera images. They were related to collocated broadband irradiance measurements to analyse the temporal and spatial changes of the surface albedo. Multiple linear regression was applied to assign the measured areal albedo to the corresponding surface-types. The resulting surface-type fractions, the albedo data and respective upward and downward broadband solar irradiances of several flights throughout the melting and refreezing season are provided.

Helicopter-borne RGB orthomosaics and photogrammetric digital elevation models from the MOSAiC Expedition.

The Multidisciplinary Drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) expedition took place between October 2019 and September 2020 giving the rare opportunity to monitor sea-ice properties over a full annual cycle. Here we present 24 high-resolution orthomosaics and 14 photogrammetric digital elevation models of the sea-ice surface around the icebreaker RV Polarstern between March and September 2020. The dataset is based on >34.000 images acquired by a helicopter-borne optical camera system with survey flights covering areas between 1.8 and 96.5 km2 around the vessel. Depending on the flight pattern and altitude of the helicopter, ground resolutions of the orthomosaics range between 0.03 and 0.5 m. By combining the photogrammetric products with contemporaneously acquired airborne laser scanner reflectance measurements selected orthomosaics could be corrected for cloud shadows which facilitates their usage for sea-ice and melt pond classification algorithms. The presented dataset is a valuable data source for the interdisciplinary MOSAiC community building a temporal and spatially resolved baseline to accompany various remote sensing and in situ research projects.

High Mountain Asian glacier response to climate revealed by multi-temporal satellite observations since the 1960s.

Knowledge about the long-term response of High Mountain Asian glaciers to climatic variations is paramount because of their important role in sustaining Asian river flow. Here, a satellite-based time series of glacier mass balance for seven climatically different regions across High Mountain Asia since the 1960s shows that glacier mass loss rates have persistently increased at most sites. Regional glacier mass budgets ranged from -0.40 ± 0.07 m w.e.a-1 in Central and Northern Tien Shan to -0.06 ± 0.07 m w.e.a-1 in Eastern Pamir, with considerable temporal and spatial variability. Highest rates of mass loss occurred in Central Himalaya and Northern Tien Shan after 2015 and even in regions where glaciers were previously in balance with climate, such as Eastern Pamir, mass losses prevailed in recent years. An increase in summer temperature explains the long-term trend in mass loss and now appears to drive mass loss even in regions formerly sensitive to both temperature and precipitation.