Comment on "Friction at the bed does not control fast glacier flow"

Brent M Minchew; Colin R Meyer; Samuel S Pegler; Bradley P Lipovsky; Alan W Rempel; G Hilmar Gudmundsson; Neal R Iverson

doi:10.1126/science.aau6055

Comment on "Friction at the bed does not control fast glacier flow"

Science. 2019 Feb 8;363(6427):eaau6055. doi: 10.1126/science.aau6055.

Authors

Brent M Minchew¹, Colin R Meyer², Samuel S Pegler³, Bradley P Lipovsky⁴, Alan W Rempel², G Hilmar Gudmundsson⁵, Neal R Iverson⁶

Affiliations

¹ Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA. minchew@mit.edu.
² Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA.
³ School of Mathematics, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK.
⁴ Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA.
⁵ Geography and Environmental Sciences, Northumbria University, Newcastle, UK.
⁶ Department of Geological and Atmospheric Sciences, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA.

PMID: 30733388
DOI: 10.1126/science.aau6055

Abstract

Stearns and van der Veen (Reports, 20 July 2018, p. 273) conclude that fast glacier sliding is independent of basal drag (friction), even where drag balances most of the driving stress. This conclusion raises fundamental physical issues, the most striking of which is that sliding velocity would be independent of stresses imparted through the ice column, including gravitational driving stress.

Publication types

Comment