Discover Barclay Kamb’s 1990 talk on Antarctic ice sheets and disintegration potentials. View the talk related PDF at calteches.library.caltech.edu.

• Source https://archive.org/details/capsca_000155

Kamb studied the mechanics of glacier flow, with an emphasis on basal sliding, surging, and streaming flow in the Antarctic ice sheet. Professor Kamb focused his explorations on the flow of streams in Antarctic glacier ice sheets. His research led to very important discoveries about ice sheets in the 1990s and early 2000s. These ice sheets contained ice streams, which were streams that flowed inside of the sheets with speeds 100 times greater than the movement of the normal ice sheet motion. Kamb reported that if these streams were to increase in speed and become larger, this could potentially cause a collapse of the ice sheets.

To explain the motion of these ice streams as well as surging glaciers, he devised the theory that heat generated in the till melts water that lubricates the glacier to make the flow of the ice stream more like a landslide than a normal glacier. One of his most important contributions to the study of glacier motion was drilling through glaciers to their bases and sampling and imaging the contact between the glacier and the underlying rock. In order to study these ice streams, Kamb and a team of 13 to 14 people made multiple expeditions to the Antarctic. In the October 2002 to January 2003 expedition, they installed video cameras and equipment to allow for remote data analysis, so teams would not have to venture out so often.