SES-06. Spatially Variable Elastic Crustal Deformation in Southwest Greenland

Abstract
The melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) is transferring huge quantities of mass across the Earth’s surface, deforming the underlying crust. Understanding how this deformation varies over short wavelengths remains challenging, particularly when mass moves through a variety of different environments and is convolved with longer-term deformation occurring in response to changing historical loads. In land terminating portions of the GrIS mass is transported from the ice sheet margin through glaciofluvial river networks. In these proglacial terrains the separation of the different drivers of elastic deformation remains challenging, impacting interpretations of ice sheet history. In this work we use differential synthetic aperture radar (DInSAR) timeseries data, combined with GNSS timeseries to provide high resolution maps of deformation in southwest Greenland. We focus on the Søndre Strømfjord region of west Greenland where long term GNSS sites sit adjacent to the sediment rich Watson River system and therefore may be affected by short term movement of surface mass. Maps of surface displacement are compared to previous regional estimates of surface change and we begin to unpack our results by isolating elastic deformation driven by ice sheet unloading using elastic modeling.