Abstract.

The Müller Ice Cap will soon set the scene for a new drilling project. Therefore, ice thickness estimates are necessary for planning since thickness measurements of the ice cap are sparse. Here, two models are presented and compared, i) a simple inversion of the shallow ice approximation (SIA inversion) by the use of a single radar line in combination with the glacier outline, surface slope, and elevation, and ii) an iterative inverse method using the Parallel Ice Sheet Model (PISM). The two methods mostly agree about a good drill site candidate. However, the new semi-empirical SIA inversion is insensitive to mass balance, computationally fast, and provides better fits.

Thesis

This paper built upon work done in ASP Zinck’s MSc thesis.

Data