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My colleague Lukas Arenson and I have a paper in the Proceedings of Mine Water Solutions in Extreme Environments this month, which uses the Isua site in Southwest Greenland as a case study for extreme runoff in proglacial environments (Arenson and Colgan, 2015). The recently approved Isua mine will be an open pit mine intersecting the ice sheet, with ice pit walls around about half the pit, to access what is presently a subglacial iron deposit (site overview here). Using a Monte Carlo approach, we estimate a 95 % (or two sigma) upper confidence limit of 2.8·10⁹ L/day of ice sheet runoff potentially reaching the Isua site in July and August. While this potential inflow rate, equivalent to 44 t/s, is relatively large in the context of conventional mine water management, it is relatively small in the context of contemporary Greenland ice loss due to climate change, which is approximately 8,300 t/s when averaged over a year (Andersen et al., 2015).

Minimum and maximum plausible supraglacial ice sheet catchments associated with the Isua site. Shading denotes mean annual meltwater runoff over the 2004 to 2013. Background image source is Landsat 8 (source: Arenson and Colgan, 2015).

To place our estimate in context, London Mining Plc, the initial developer of the Isua site, presented a pre-feasibility study water balance in which ice sheet runoff into the pit was estimated as 7.8·10⁶ m³/year (London Mining, 2011). Assuming a 60-day melt season, this is equivalent to an average site inflow of 1.3·10⁸ L/day. Our estimate is therefore 22 times greater than the design estimate. There are many potential sources of uncertainty when assessing ice sheet runoff, including model uncertainty and climatic variability, but by far the biggest source of uncertainty is delineating the ice sheet catchment draining to a specific portion of the ice sheet margin. Regardless of whether 10⁸ or 10⁹ L/day of meltwater is flowing into the Isua site, it will certainly be a challenging operating environment, and will require some very adaptive engineering to minimize site contact water!

Proponent water budget for the Isua Mine (source: London Mining, 2011).

Oblique aerial photograph looking west from the Greenland ice sheet across the Isua site in 2011. Deeply incised supraglacial meltwater channels are visible draining towards the margin. (source: Lukas Arenson)

References

Andersen et al., 2015. Basin-scale partitioning of Greenland ice sheet mass balance components (2007–2011). Earth and Planetary Science Letters 409: 89-95.

Arenson and Colgan. 2015. Water management challenges associated with mining projects in Greenland. Proceedings of Mine Water Solutions in Extreme Environments. 533-543.

London Mining PLC. 2011. Isua iron ore project: Isua 15 Mtpa scoping study report.

We have a new study coming out in Earth and Planetary Science Letters that looks into the mass loss of the Greenland ice sheet (Andersen et al., 2015). We used the “input-output” approach, whereby an estimated iceberg production rate is differenced from an estimated snow accumulation rate. The input-output approach we used was slightly different from previous studies (such as Rignot et al., 2008 or Enderlin et al., 2014) because the ice sheet perimeter across which we observed ice flow (or the “flux gate”) was relatively far inland. That meant we had to make a different assumption about the vertical velocity profile at the flux gate, as well as account for changes in ice volume between the flux gate and the tidewater glacier grounding lines. We also used a new combination of satellite-derived ice surface velocity product, airborne radar-derived ice thickness observations, and surface mass balance simulations. Despite all this, our mass loss estimate agrees pretty well with previous studies!

The numbers are pretty striking: We estimate that between 2007 and 2011 the Greenland ice sheet alone, not counting all the peripheral glaciers in Greenland, lost 262 Gt of ice per year. That works out to about 8300 tonnes per second! That means the Greenland ice sheet probably weighs 250,000 tonnes less than when you started reading this blog post. No wonder we can measure its mass loss by gravitational anomalies! The ice sheet is currently losing mass via both surface runoff (the difference between accumulation and melt) and ice dynamics (the production of icebergs). We estimate that runoff comprised about 61 % of the ice sheet’s mass loss, or about 5000 tonnes per second, with iceberg production comprising the remaining 3300 tonnes per second of mass loss. Some big numbers that confirm the Greenland ice sheet is presently raising global mean sea level by about 0.73 mm per year.

Enderlin, E., I. Howat, S. Jeong, M. Noh, J. van Angelen & M. van den Broeke. 2014. An improved mass budget for the Greenland ice sheet. Geophysical Research Letters. 41: doi:10.1002/2013GL059010.

Rignot, E., J. Box, E. Burgess & E. Hanna. 2008. Mass balance of the Greenland ice sheet from 1958 to 2007. Geophysical Research Letters. 35: doi:10.1029/2008GL035417.

Andersen, M., L. Stenseng, H. Skourup, W. Colgan, S. Khan, S. Kristensen, S. Andersen, J. Box, A. Ahlstrøm, X. Fettweis & R. Forsberg. 2015. Basin-scale partitioning of Greenland ice sheet mass balance components (2007–2011). Earth and Planetary Science Letters. 409: 89–95. doi:10.1016/j.epsl.2014.10.015.

Diagram showing differences in methodology between our study (TOP) and previous studies (BOTTOM) in converted estimated ice flux (F) into estimated iceberg production (D). We adopt a higher elevation “flux gate”, which necessitates accounting for downstream changes in ice volume (∆S), as well as making a different assumption about the vertical velocity profile at the flux gate. We also use different velocity and ice thickness observations, and a different surface mass balance (SMB) model (from Andersen et al., 2015).