ICEWAVEGUIDE

By showing that variations of ice thickness and mechanical properties at Vallunden Lake can be monitored for several weeks, it will be possible to relate these variations to those of the temperature, thus allowing short-term trends to be established. Once this concept is proved, a transfer towards sea ice is only one step away, but it is of course subject to opportunities of an access to the Arctic. Given such a possibility, for example via the MOCAIC project (http://www.mosaicobservatory.org/), actual new observables about sea ice will be provided. Potentially, such new observables may improve our understanding of sea ice resilience and thus open the way towards more reliable, climate-related forecasting models.

Given recent tendencies that aim at re-establishing seismology for probing the cryosphere, it is legitimate to contemplate, in a foreseeable future, the extrapolation of the methodology in the ICEWAVEGUIDE project to data collected in the ice cap, and also to ice shelves. Of course, given the much larger thickness, guided waves are unlikely to be measured. Instead, body, surface and interface waves can be measured. Radar waves already provide accurate thickness measurements in these structures, but seismic waves could play a major role for imaging the different layers underneath, and thus help understanding the various associated processes.