A method to reconstruct past accumulation rates in alpine firn regions: A study on Fiescherhorn, Swiss Alps

Abstract

Annual snow layers in the accumulation zone of glaciers become thinner by viscous deformation while moving to greater depth. The reconstruction of the accumulation rate history requires the correction of the thickness of annual layers. We apply a novel method to determine the vertical velocity by repeated survey with a caliper probe of grooves scratched into the wall of a borehole. With this information and the assumptions of steady state velocity and density fields, the correction of layer thicknesses can be determined without knowledge of the ice density profile and thus can be applied to boreholes without ice cores. The method is applied to a borehole on Fiescherhorn, Swiss Alps, resulting in a substantially larger correction than with the simpler method of Nye (1963). Copyright 2006 by the American Geophysical Union.