This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). In this project funded by the Major Research Instrumentation (MRI) Program, the PI?s will develop a new, international (8-nation), broadband seismic capability for Greenland - the GreenLand Ice Sheet monitoring Network (GLISN) - a real-time sensor array of 25 stations which enhances and upgrades the performance of the scarce existing Greenland seismic infrastructure for detecting, locating, and characterizing glacial earthquakes and other cryo-seismic phenomena, and contributing to our understanding of Ice Sheet dynamics. Complementing data from satellites, geodesy, and other sources, in concert with these technologies GLISN provides a powerful tool for seeing change, and will advance new frontiers of research in the glacial systems, the underlying geological and geophysical processes affecting the Greenland Ice Sheet, interactions between oceans, climate, and the cryosphere, and other multidisciplinary areas of interest to geoscience and climate dynamics. The development of the telemetry infrastructure linking the sites together into a coherent framework creates the temporal resolving capability and potential for rapid scientific response.
GLISN is an international collaboration on a problem of global importance. Participating countries include the USA, Denmark, Canada, Germany, Norway, Switzerland, Italy, and Japan. GLISN creates a new large, freely and openly available, real-time data set to enhance existing monitoring efforts and catalyze new interdisciplinary scientific research and education while establishing a fiducial reference framework for facilitating regionalized studies of Greenland glacial systems. GLISN data will advance understanding of the solid Earth and cryo-seismic source mechanisms from a region of important societal relevance.
