At the annual meeting this December, I’ll be making an invited presentation and co-convening a different session.  On behalf of AGU’s Cryosphere focus group, I am serving on the meeting planning committee.

The fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union is the largest meeting of geophysicists, including cryosphere and climate scientists, worldwide.  This year, my involvement in the annual meeting is greater than ever.  I’ve been invited to give a presentation on the links between glaciers that flow into the ocean and their fjords, and I’m co-convening a different session on a similar topic.  With Adam Winstral, a snow scientist, I’m serving on the meeting’s program committee to assist with scheduling the nearly 40 different sessions that will be available under the Cryosphere umbrella at this year’s conference.

I’ve recently co-authored an accessible review of recent research into iceberg calving.  You can read it by clicking here.

Approximately half of the ice loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet occurs where glaciers flow directly into the ocean.  At the ice/ocean interface, glacier ice is lost through fracturing (i.e., iceberg calving) and melting in contact with the relatively warm ocean.  The rates of this ice loss has increased in recent years, which has drawn significant attention within the glaciological community to the calving and submarine melting processes.  However, there is much that we still need to understand about calving before we can reliably predict how rapidly glacier might calve in the future.

For a newsletter targeted at a broad audience, Jeremy Bassis and I have summarized the existing research on iceberg calving, and some of the ways in which we can improve on our understanding of calving.  The other articles within this newsletter summarize other perspectives on the relationship between the Greenland Ice Sheet and its surrounding oceans.  The full newsletter, from which I’ve excerpted our piece on calving, is available here.

I recently joined the UT Marine Geology and Geophysics field course on the Gulf of Mexico to learn about methods to study the seafloor.  When deployed at the fronts of glaciers, these techniques can help us identify the stability of glaciers that end in the ocean.

My research frequently draws on a wide variety of disciplines to answer questions about glacier behavior.  Seafloor sediments not only reveal when a glacier last occupied a specific location, but rapid submarine sediment accumulation can help to stabilize a tidewater glacier terminus.  When a terminus is in contact with a barrier of thick sediment, ice loss is decreased because the sediment can shield the glacier terminus from warm ocean water and reduce the rate of stretching at the glacier front.  These topics are pertinent to the past, present, and future dynamics of ocean-terminating glaciers.

While based out of Galveston, TX, I joined the UT MG&G field course for two days on a Gulf of Mexico research vessel.  We acquired CHIRP and reflection seismic data to investigate the properties of the seafloor subsurface at two different scales/resolutions (~cm resolution for ~10 m, and ~m resolution for ~100 m).  We also took vibracore samples of the top meter or so of the seafloor.  Not only did I learn a great deal about the capabilities of these techniques, I had a lot of fun.  Thanks to Dr. Sean Gulick, Dr. John Goff, Marcy Davis, and Dan Duncan for welcoming me to their program.

I look forward to including these techniques in future research to better understand the dynamics of tidewater glaciers in Greenland, Alaska, and elsewhere.

This week, I’ve been in Fairbanks learning how to use radar to gain an unprecedentedly sharp view of glacier motion.  We’ll be deploying this technology in Greenland this summer.

While camping at the terminus of Rink Isbrae (71.5 degrees N) for 8 days, we’ll be scanning the toe of the glacier every 3 minutes and recording motion between consecutive scans.  Variations in glacier flow speed at these high frequencies can tell us about the forces that drive and resist glacier motion, as well as connections between motion and iceberg production.  These data will support the broader project goal of understanding the factors controlling the retreat and acceleration of glaciers that flow into the ocean.

Thanks go to Mark Fahnestock, a professor at the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, for lending our Univ. of Texas and Univ. of Kansas team one of his new radar instruments for our fieldwork.

A very nice summary of the main project I am working on has just been published here.  With interviews and photos, Marcy Davis describes the goals for our work and the methods we’re employing to learn about the glaciers and ocean in West Greenland.

Since arriving at UTIG in January, I’ve been continuing to explore how seismology can inform us about glacier behavior.  Now, with the summer field season approaching, colleagues and I are preparing to return to Greenland and recover a year’s worth of data on tidewater glacier and fjord interactions.

Planning is now in full swing with colleagues here at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics, as well as the Univ. of Kansas, Univ. of Oregon, Oregon State Univ., and NASA, to return to the coast of western Greenland.  Our teams of glaciologists and oceanographers will be in the field from mid-July through mid-August to collect data recorded since July 2013, and reset instruments for another year of remote operation.  We all are excited to see how our equipment managed through the harsh winter at 71 degrees N, at the edge of the Greenland Ice Sheet.

The data we collect will help us better understand some of the intricacies of glacier response to changing climate, and project how Greenland’s glaciers may continue to change in the face of ongoing climate change.