TY - JOUR
T1 - First measurement of ice-bedrock interface of alpine glaciers by cosmic muon radiography
AU - Nishiyama, R.
AU - Ariga, Akitaka
AU - Ariga, T.
AU - Käser, S.
AU - Lechmann, A.
AU - Mair, D.
AU - Scampoli, P.
AU - Vladymyrov, M.
AU - Ereditato, A.
AU - Schlunegger, F.
N1 - Funding Information:
This project is financially supported by Swiss National Science Foundation as an interdisciplinary research project (159299). We also benefited from the emulsion films R&D project supported by Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione grant PZ00P2_154833. We warmly acknowledge M. Nakamura and his colleagues from F-lab, Nagoya University. We would like to express our gratitude to Jungfraubahn for the enormous help with the detector installation. The digital elevation model of the Jungfrau region was provided by Swisstopo. We would like to acknowledge the precious contributions of the technical staff from the LHEP and the Institute for Geological Science of the University of Bern. We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their useful suggestions that helped us to improve the manuscript. The original data used in the analysis and the details of the methods are available from the supporting information.
Publisher Copyright:
©2017. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved.
PY - 2017/6/28
Y1 - 2017/6/28
N2 - The shape of the bedrock underneath alpine glaciers bears vital information on the erosional mechanism related to the flow of ice. So far, several geophysical exploration methods have been proposed to map the bedrock topography though with limited accuracy. Here we illustrate the first results from a technology, called cosmic ray muon radiography, newly applied in glacial geology to investigate the bedrock geometry beneath the Aletsch Glacier situated in the Central Swiss Alps. For this purpose we installed new cosmic muon detectors made of emulsion films at three sites along the Jungfrau railway tunnel and measured the shape of the bedrock under the uppermost part of Aletsch Glacier (Jungfraufirn). Our results constrain the continuation of the bedrock-ice interface up to a depth of 50 m below the surface, where the bedrock underneath the glacier strikes NE-SW and dips at 45° ± 5°. This documents the first successful application of this technology to a glaciated environment.
AB - The shape of the bedrock underneath alpine glaciers bears vital information on the erosional mechanism related to the flow of ice. So far, several geophysical exploration methods have been proposed to map the bedrock topography though with limited accuracy. Here we illustrate the first results from a technology, called cosmic ray muon radiography, newly applied in glacial geology to investigate the bedrock geometry beneath the Aletsch Glacier situated in the Central Swiss Alps. For this purpose we installed new cosmic muon detectors made of emulsion films at three sites along the Jungfrau railway tunnel and measured the shape of the bedrock under the uppermost part of Aletsch Glacier (Jungfraufirn). Our results constrain the continuation of the bedrock-ice interface up to a depth of 50 m below the surface, where the bedrock underneath the glacier strikes NE-SW and dips at 45° ± 5°. This documents the first successful application of this technology to a glaciated environment.
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U2 - 10.1002/2017GL073599
DO - 10.1002/2017GL073599
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85021432747
VL - 44
SP - 6244
EP - 6251
JO - Geophysical Research Letters
JF - Geophysical Research Letters
SN - 0094-8276
IS - 12
ER -