Stream hydrology controls on ice cliff evolution  and survival on debris-covered glaciers

Petersen, Eric; Hock, Regine; Loso, Michael G.

doi:https://doi.org/10.5194/esurf-12-727-2024

Articles | Volume 12, issue 3

https://doi.org/10.5194/esurf-12-727-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

https://doi.org/10.5194/esurf-12-727-2024

© Author(s) 2024. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Articles | Volume 12, issue 3

Research article

|

13 May 2024

Research article |

| 13 May 2024

Stream hydrology controls on ice cliff evolution and survival on debris-covered glaciers

Eric Petersen, Regine Hock, and Michael G. Loso

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Final revised paper (published on 13 May 2024)
Supplement to the final revised paper
Preprint (discussion started on 26 Sep 2023)
Supplement to the preprint

Interactive discussion

Status: closed

RC1: 'Comment on egusphere-2023-1913', Marin Kneib, 06 Oct 2023

See comments attached

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2023-1913-RC1
RC2: 'Comment on egusphere-2023-1913', Anonymous Referee #2, 10 Oct 2023

Please see attached comments

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2023-1913-RC2
AC1: 'Author's Response to Reviewers on egusphere-2023-1913', Eric Peterson, 23 Nov 2023

The comment was uploaded in the form of a supplement: https://egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/2023/egusphere-2023-1913/egusphere-2023-1913-AC1-supplement.pdf

Citation: https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2023-1913-AC1

Peer review completion

AR: Author's response | RR: Referee report | ED: Editor decision | EF: Editorial file upload

AR by Eric Peterson on behalf of the Authors (21 Dec 2023) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Referee Nomination & Report Request started (08 Jan 2024) by Frances E. G. Butcher

RR by Marin Kneib (14 Jan 2024)

Suggestions for revision or reasons for rejection

Dear authors,

Thank you for the revision of your manuscript and your answer to my comments. I find your article to be of high quality and scientific relevance. I still had a few minor points (see below) that I feel should be addressed before publication. Line numbers correspond to the document with tracked changes.

Best regards,

Marin

L32: ‘exposed ice in ice cliffs’ sounds a bit weird – ‘exposed ice at the surface of ice cliffs’ would be a better term.

L38: No dash between ‘Changri’ and ‘Nup’, just a space.

L34-39: Nice inclusion, but as it is it’s all a bit jumbled together with no logical order. It would make sense to distinguish modeling from purely observational studies.

L46: Well I guess then it cannot be attributed to ice dynamics only but rather to a mixture of both contributions.

Figure 1: Missing parenthesis at the end of the caption.

L68: there seems to be a missing connector between ‘erode’ and ‘transport’

L88: it is not clear here if these melt rates are for the whole glacier or just for the debris-covered part.

L119 & 122: if ‘a threshold minimum steepest slope value was tested…’ (l118), then it is more a mapping ‘calibration’ than ‘validation’. As it is, it would be appropriate to split the manual outlines between a calibration and validation dataset to account for potential biases/overfitting issues, and to adequately quantify uncertainties of the mapping.

L123-124: What metric did you use for the calibration?

L152: ‘himalayan’ can be removed as ice sails can be found elsewhere. If needed, you can specify ‘ice sails in the Karakorum’ outside of the parenthesis. Note that the Himalayas do not encompass the Karakorum.

L178-181: Thanks for your efforts in trying to quantify the uncertainties in the different angles. While 2 cliffs is better than none, it would strengthen the analysis if you could conduct this exercise for ~10 cliffs to be more representative.

L202-207: it is common for this type of exercise to use a metric that combines TP, FP & FN (as there will in any case be an overwhelming number of TN) such as the F1-score. It would be useful to indicate this score here, as it will enable a better comparison with other methods.

Figure S3: Just to be sure, (c) shows the mean aspect of individual cliffs? This needs to be specified somewhere. I actually find it interesting to not see any obvious aspect-bias to north-facing cliffs in this figure. This could be an argument in favour of L446-447, which at the moment is only based on one particular observation (so quite weak argument) – could you perhaps look at the aspect distribution of stream-influenced and non stream-influenced cliffs to check this?

L227-235: this is a very nice addition!

Figure 10: dot missing in the caption before (b-c)

L388: link missing – maybe ‘Such abandoned stream channel…’?

L419: dot missing

L449-450: I disagree, you observe similar shapes for pond-influenced cliffs.

L452-453: this sentence falls out of nowhere and is based on one particular field observation. As such, I don’t think it is a main conclusion of this article. Similarly for the paragraph 444-447, which should be removed if it cannot be backed-up by more robust observations.

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ED: Publish subject to minor revisions (review by editor) (18 Jan 2024) by Frances E. G. Butcher

AR by Eric Peterson on behalf of the Authors (08 Feb 2024) Author's response Author's tracked changes Manuscript

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (21 Feb 2024) by Frances E. G. Butcher

ED: Publish subject to technical corrections (06 Mar 2024) by Tom Coulthard (Editor)

AR by Eric Peterson on behalf of the Authors (13 Mar 2024) Manuscript

Short summary

Ice cliffs are melt hot spots that increase melt rates on debris-covered glaciers which otherwise see a reduction in melt rates. In this study, we show how surface runoff streams contribute to the generation, evolution, and survival of ice cliffs by carving into the glacier and transporting rocky debris. On Kennicott Glacier, Alaska, 33 % of ice cliffs are actively influenced by streams, while nearly half are within 10 m of streams.