Sea level rise is a critical problem for coastal communities with communities threatened by increased nuisance flooding, major flooding events and contamination of fresh water. Sea level rise is directly tied to the fate of ice sheets and how they respond to a warming climate.  To make informed decisions, social scientists and policy makers require projections of sea level rise.  Our research directly feeds into this need.  Our approach to this problem in this project is to produce physical models of the processes governing flow and fracture of ice. Our project focused on simulating the effect of iceberg calving on sea level rise to provide upper bounds on the contribution of ice sheets to sea level rise in the coming century.  We examined processes that control cracks in ice, called crevasses, in glaciers and ice sheets using techniques originally designed to simulate how rocks break on the surface of the Earth.  As part of this project, we developed models that treat ice as boulders of ice glued together by bonds.  By allowing the bonds to break, we can simulate the patterns of fracture that form in ice under different geometries.  This new method showed that the shape of glaciers has a first order control on when--and how--glaciers break.  This model, however, only works on short time scales (minutes to hours).  To address longer time scale (months-to-years-to-centuries), we also developed simpler models that allow the ice to fail when the stresses acting to break the ice get too large.  We have built a variety of models based on these principles that can be used to simulate the century (or longer) evolution of glaciers that drain the Greenland Ice Sheet.  The models developed as part of this study are posted are freely available on GitHub (https://github.com/jbassis/pyglacier,  https://github.com/ehultee/plastic-networks, https://github.com/jbassis/m-ice) and are available to the broader research community to download. 

We also examined how useful or usable projections are to local communities.  Recognizing that scientists only rarely interact with local communities, we suggested that regional organizations could play a larger role in translating sea level rise projections to a broader spectrum of stake holders.  As part of our study we also educated several graduate and undergraduate students. Our mentoring and recruiting effort focused on proactively fostering a diverse set of students and training them to interact in increasingly inter-disciplinary communities.

This research project also sought to improve high school and undergraduate education in the field of glaciology by developing a hands-on experiment to demonstrate how ice flows. Our experiment, uses a mixture of Crisco and mineral oil (yes it is a bit gross) in a tank of water.  The Crisco and mineral oil mixture is viscous and floats on ordinary tap water.  We can use cameras that allow students to see the side view and top view and create time-lapse photography of the motion of the mixture as it flows out, mimicking the behavior of a glacier as it flows out into the ocean.  

Last Modified: 11/14/2018
Modified by: Jeremy N Bassis