Awarded Small Bets Seed Grant 2020!

The project Like a knife through butter- glacial melt by ocean plumes investigated in novel laboratory experiments has been awarded the Small Bets Seed Grant 2020. This is a collaboration with Dr. Alexander Robel from the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech. We are excited!

Here is a synopsis-

Melt from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are increasingly contributing to ongoing global sea level rise. This ice sheet mass loss is primarily driven by the thinning, retreat and acceleration of glaciers in contact with the ocean. Observations from the field and remote-sensing platforms indicates that glaciers are sensitive to changes at the ice-ocean interface and that the increase in submarine melting is likely to be driven by the discharge of meltwater from underneath the glacier (known as subglacial meltwater plumes). The melting of glacier ice also directly inputs a large volume of freshwater into the ocean, potentially causing significant changes in the circulation of ocean waters which regulate the transport of heat on Earth, making ice-ocean interactions an important potential amplifier in climate change and variability. Our ability to predict, and hence adequately response to, climate change and sea level rise therefore depends on our knowledge of the small-scale processes occurring in the vicinity of subglacial meltwater plumes at the ice-ocean interface. Currently, our understanding of the underlying physics is incomplete; for example, different parameterizations of the glacial-ocean interaction could yield melting rates that vary over a factor of five for the same heat supply from the ocean. It is then very difficult to ascertain and judge the reliability of predictive models. We propose to use laboratory experiments to study how the melt rates of glaciers in the vicinity of plumes are affected by the ice roughness, ice geometry, and ocean turbulence at the ice-ocean interface.