A GHUB PLUG-IN FOR STREAMLINED ACCESS TO GREENLAND ICE SHEET GEOCHRONOLOGIC CONSTRAINTS

We describe a python-based online tool with a simple user interface that provides the Greenland Ice Sheet community easy access to geochronologic constraints on past Greenland Ice Sheet changes. These data are critical for testing and training models that forecast future Greenland Ice Sheet changes. Ensuring the validity of these models allows for more accurate predictions of ice sheet response to climate change, and ultimately potential sea level rise contributions from Greenland. Efficient access to the latest and most comprehensive geochronologic datasets – such as cosmogenic-nuclide exposure ages that constrain past Greenland Ice Sheet margin fluctuations – presents a challenge from the data assimilation perspective. However, the recently developed ICE-D (Informal Cosmogenic-nuclide Exposure-age Database) database, a “transparent-middle-layer” data management and computation infrastructure, stores a continuously updated database of cosmogenic-nuclide measurements, allowing the community access to many datasets worldwide. The tool we present here has a simple interface that allows users to query the ICE-D database for a suite of purposes and gives users several formatting options for data output. The tool is incorporated into Ghub, a community-driven scientific and educational cyberinfrastructure that serves as a nexus of Greenland and cryosphere sciences across many disciplines. The goal is to provide Ghub community members – including ice sheet modelers and others – with a simple and efficient tool that accesses the latest and most comprehensive cosmogenic-nuclide datasets constraining past Greenland Ice Sheet size. Our tool will provide non-geochronology specialists with easier access to ICE-D and thus may improve ice sheet models.