glenglat: a database of global englacial temperatures
<p>Measurements of englacial temperatures have been collected since the earliest years of glaciology, with the first measurements dating back to the mid-19th century. Although temperature is a defining characteristic of any glacier – and is notoriously laborious to collect – no effort had bee...
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| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Copernicus Publications
2025-04-01
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| Series: | Earth System Science Data |
| Online Access: | https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/17/1627/2025/essd-17-1627-2025.pdf |
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| Summary: | <p>Measurements of englacial temperatures have been collected since the earliest years of glaciology, with the first measurements dating back to the mid-19th century. Although temperature is a defining characteristic of any glacier – and is notoriously laborious to collect – no effort had been made yet to gather all existing measurements. In an attempt to make existing ice temperature data more accessible, we present glenglat, the <strong>gl</strong>obal <strong>engla</strong>cial <strong>t</strong>emperature database compiled from 316 literature sources and 12 data submissions and composed of 1 931 831 measurements of depth and temperature from 788 boreholes located on 213 glaciers outside the ice sheets. Alongside recent compilations for the ice sheets <span class="cit" id="xref_paren.1">(<a href="#bib1.bibx168">Løkkegaard et al.</a>, <a href="#bib1.bibx168">2023</a>; <a href="#bib1.bibx303">Vandecrux et al.</a>, <a href="#bib1.bibx303">2023</a>)</span>, most published englacial temperature measurements are now readily available to the research community.</p>
<p>Here, we review the variety of glacier thermal regimes that have been measured and summarize the spatial, temporal, and climatic coverage of measurements relative to the global glacierized area. Measurements of cold and polythermal glacier ice greatly outnumber those of temperate ice. Overall, temperature has been measured in fewer than <span class="inline-formula">1 ‰</span> of all glaciers, and only 27 <span class="inline-formula">%</span> of boreholes have been measured more than once, highlighting the great potential to investigate changing temperature conditions by repeating past measurements. The database is developed on GitHub (<span class="uri">https://github.com/mjacqu/glenglat</span>, last access: 7 April 2024) and published to Zenodo <span class="cit" id="xref_paren.2">(<span class="uri">https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11516611</span>, <a href="#bib1.bibx329">Welty et al.</a>, <a href="#bib1.bibx329">2025</a>)</span>. It consists of four relational tables and detailed machine-actionable and human-readable metadata. The GitHub repository also provides submission instructions (including a spreadsheet template and validation tools), in the hope that investigators will help us keep glenglat complete and current going forward. We hope that glenglat will improve our understanding of glacier thermal regimes, refine glacier thermodynamic models, and give insight into hazardous glacier instabilities in a warming world.</p> |
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| ISSN: | 1866-3508 1866-3516 |