Research Interests
Sea-ice — Ice-shelf Interactions
My research as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow is focused on the interactions between sea ice and ice shelves. Sea ice can provide protection and stability to ice shelves, which themselves provide resistance to the flow of Earth’s ice sheets. I am using two, high-fidelity 3D computer models to simulate the break-up of ice shelves with the aim of quantifying the stability that sea ice contributes to ice shelves. This would lead to the coupling of the sea ice and ice sheet components of Earth System Models, ultimately contributing to improved predictions of ice loss and sea level rise. For this project, I am focusing on the Thwaites Glacier and the Scar Inlet Ice Shelf, both in Antarctica, and the Milne Ice Shelf in the Canadian High Arctic. The Milne Ice Shelf sustained a large break-up event in 2020, and I joined a field trip to the Milne Ice Shelf and Milne Fiord in July 2022 to collect data for my modelling of that event. My personal work was supported by the Trebek Initiative of the National Geographic Society and Royal Canadian Geographic Society, and was in partnership with oceanographers, environmental experts from Grise Fiord, NU, and hydrographers. Exciting, yet disheartening, change to the Milne Fiord and Milne epishelf lake were observed during this trip, which you can learn more about through the work of Dustin Patar on the media page. There is more to come as we dig into our analyses following this trip.
Thwaites and Rapid Glacier Retreat
I joined the DOMINOS project of the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration in 2019 under PI Doug Benn at the University of St Andrews. This is where I began my glaciological investigations with the finite element model, Elmer/Ice, and discrete element model, HiDEM, with colleagues at the CSC-IT Centre for Science in Espoo, Finland. We often pair these models to have the “best of both worlds” in terms of simulating glacier flow and fracture. This pairing led to new insights into the glacier calving process called ice-cliff failure, and if and when this leads to marine ice-cliff instability. The model pairing also led to new revelations about the stability of weakening ice shelves that interact with pinning points, showcasing a new mechanism through which ice shelves can fail. I am currently working with these two models to understand more about the calving dynamics at the western calving front of Thwaites Glacier.
Ice Islands
Ice islands are simply massive tabular icebergs. As a graduate student in the Water and Ice Research Lab at Carleton University with Derek Mueller, I investigated the deterioration of ice islands from Petermann Glacier. I conducted nine cruises in the Canadian Arctic on board the CCGS Amundsen, a Canadian icebreaker that was outfitted for oceanographic research by ArcticNet (at the time). My field work ranged from the collection of ice island thinning data via the installation of an ice penetrating radar (see a time-lapse of the installation), laser scan and aerial photo surveying for 3D model generation, and the deployment of ice tracking beacons. I continue to dabble in this research field and primarily use remote sensing data and large datasets compiled using satellite imagery. This is namely the Canadian Ice Island Drift, Deterioration and Detection (CI2D3) Database. We have recently used the CI2D3 Database to provide baseline data regarding where ice islands drift in the eastern Canadian Arctic and are now using the database to assess the impact of wave erosion and “footloose” (see Wagner et al., 2014) calving on ice island deterioration.
An example of HiDEM simulating compression of sea ice ahead of the Thwaites Glacier calving front.
Photo: M.G. Clark