Research

My research focusses on how ice sheets interact with climate. I find it fascinating (and scary at the same time) that we know so little about the behaviour of ice sheets. How stable or rather vulnerable are the present Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets? Are we close to cross - or have we already crossed - a tipping point, where ice will continue to melt even if climate change stabilizes? And how large and (un)stable were ice sheets in the past, during warmer-than-present climates?

Exactly those questions we addressed in the recently finished EU Horizon 2020 project TiPACCs where we investigated how stable the Southern Ocean and the Antarctic ice sheet are. Ice loss from Antarctic causes global sea levels to rise, so this important topic needs to be understood better! Curious about our results? Our website (www.tipaccs.eu) and YouTube channel give lots of insights and nice explanatory videos!

I now further study the impacts of ice sheet changes, both from Antarctica, but also from the Greenland ice sheet, on the global ocean circulation, through another European project (OCEAN:ICE).

I am furthermore involved in our current efforts to include a dynamic ice sheet model into our Norwegian Earth System Model (NorESM). This work is supported by the large infrastructure project INES2, and several scientific projects (f.e. GREASE) funded by the Norwegian Research Council (RCN).

Outreach: KlimaNinja

Summer 2019 I was so lucky to join a deep ice core drilling campaign in central Greenland. I brought LEGO figures to explain to my family back home how it was to live and work on top of the ice sheet. The photo-novella is still available here (in English) and here (in Nynorsk). We also converted it into a comic book, which was peer-reviewed by a primary school class in Bergen. The book, together with 2 sequels on the LEGO ninja going to Antarctica and a Norwegian fjord were distributed to (school) libraries all over western Norway!

For more details, please visit: https://www.norceresearch.no/en/persons/petra-langebroek/858

Jonathan Winfield Rheinlænder

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Selected publications