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The flow of the Greenland Ice Sheet is controlled by subglacial processes and conditions that depend on the geological provenance and temperature of the crust beneath it, neither of which are adequately known. Here we present a seismic velocity model of the uppermost 5 km of the Greenlandic crust. We show that slow velocities in the upper crust tend to be associated with major outlet glaciers along the ice-sheet margin, and elevated geothermal heat flux along the Iceland hotspot track inland. Outlet glaciers particularly susceptible to basal slip over deformable subglacial sediments include Jakobshavn, Helheim and Kangerdlussuaq, while geothermal warming and softening of basal ice may affect the onset of faster ice flow at Petermann Glacier and the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream. Interactions with the solid earth therefore control the past, present and future dynamics of the Greenland Ice Sheet and must be adequately explored and implemented in ice sheet models.

We develop a new method for measuring ellipticity of Rayleigh waves from ambient noise records by degree-of-polarization (DOP) analysis. The new method, named DOPE , shows a good capability to retrieve accurate ellipticity curves separated from incoherent noise. In order to validate the method we perform synthetic tests simulating noise in a 1-D earth model. We also perform measurements on real data from Antarctica and Northern Italy. Observed curves show a good fit with measurements from earthquake records and with theoretical ellipticity curves. The inversion of real data measurements for v S structure shows a good agreement with previous models. In particular, the shear-wave structure beneath Concordia station shows no evidence of a significant layer of liquid water at the base of the ice. The new method can be used to measure ellipticity at high frequency and therefore it will allow the imaging of near-surface structure, and possibly of temporal changes in subsurface properties. It promises to be useful to study near-surface processes in a wide range of geological settings, such as volcanoes, fault zones and glaciers.

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