The morphology of supraglacial lake ogives

Abstract

Supraglacial lakes on grounded regions of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets sometimes produce ‘lake ogives’ or banded structures that sweep downstream from the lakes. Using a variety of remote-sensing data, we demonstrate that lake ogives originate from supraglacial lakes that form each year in the same bedrock-fixed location near the equilibrium-line altitude. As the ice flows

underneath one of these lakes, an ‘image’ of the lake is imprinted on the ice surface both by summer- season ablation and by superimposed ice (lake ice) formation. Ogives associated with a lake are

sequenced in time, with the downstream ogives being the oldest, and with spatial separation equal to the local annual ice displacement. In addition, lake ogives can have decimeter- to meter-scale topographic relief, much like wave ogives that form below icefalls on alpine glaciers. Our observations highlight the fact that lake ogives, and other related surface features, are a consequence of hydrological processes in a bedrock-fixed reference frame. These features should arise naturally from physically based thermodynamic models of supraglacial water transport, and thus they may serve as fiducial features that help to test the performance of such models.