Evolution of Shear‐Zone Fractures Presages the Disintegration of Thwaites Eastern Ice Shelf
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Thwaites Eastern Ice Shelf (TEIS) is a partially confined floating extension of Thwaites Glacier, anchored by an offshore pinning point at its northern terminus. Over the past two decades, the shelf has experienced progressive fracturing around a prominent shear zone upstream of its pinning point, gradually compromising its structural integrity. Here we present an analysis of shear‐zone fracture evolution from 2002 to 2022 and its control on the flow dynamics of the ice shelf using satellite remote sensing and in situ GPS observations. We compiled multi‐year statistics of fracture length and orientation from Landsat and Sentinel‐1 imagery and compared their changes with evolving flow dynamics and surface strain rates. Ongoing disintegration driven by the shelf's shearing against the pinning point occurred in two stages: propagation of large shearing fractures approximately parallel to flow earlier in the record, followed by the rapid formation of smaller tensile fractures approximately perpendicular to flow later in the record. We also observed velocity perturbations originating from the shear zone and propagating across the main ice shelf, observationally demonstrating the direct impact that shear‐zone disintegration has on the dynamics of TEIS.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".