Abstract:
The interaction between the Greenland Ice Sheet and the North Atlantic Ocean is one of the key links in the climate-cryosphere system. Excess ocean heat melts the margins of the ice sheet, driving glacier retreat and leading to sea level rise, while the freshwater input to the ocean from the ice sheet drives vigorous mixing of ocean water masses and upwelling of nutrients that influence ecosystems. In this talk I’ll introduce the dynamics of ice-ocean interaction in Greenland and describe how and why these have varied over the past 40 years. I’ll explain how we represented the impact of the ocean on the ice sheet in a community-wide project to predict sea level rise for the most recent IPCC report. I’ll show how dramatic improvements in data coverage now allow us to quantify water mass mixing in fjords around the continent. I’ll conclude by touching on links with ecosystems and prospects for improving the representation of ice-ocean interactions in large-scale models.
Arranged date for the seminar talk: Nov 22, 2021
Short biography:
I completed my PhD - titled 'Modeling submarine melt rates at tidewater glaciers in Greenland' - with Professor Pete Nienow at the University of Edinburgh in August 2017. My background is in Mathematics and Physics; I did Part III Mathematics at the University of Cambridge in 2012 and Mathematics and Physics at the University of Edinburgh from 2007-2011.
I currently hold a NERC Independent Research Fellowship in Glaciology and Oceanography at the University of Edinburgh. Previously, I was a postdoc at the University of St Andrews with Prof. Doug Benn, and a postdoctoral scholar at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego with Prof. Fiamma Straneo.
My research centres on understanding the effect of the ocean on the Greenland Ice Sheet, with a view to improving projections of ice sheet mass loss and sea level contribution.