Oblique view Admundson Sea embayment (near left) and Siple Coast Ice streams (far right). Velocities have been estimated with a balance velocity calculation.
Oblique view Admundson Sea embayment (near left) and Siple Coast Ice streams (far right). Velocities have been estimated with a balance velocity calculation.
I did a dissertation on basal melt water in ice sheets. The problem is one of interest due to the role that melt water plays in sliding, or fast motion of ice. Fast moving ice is responsible for 90% of ice entering the ocean from Antarctica. This continues to be my primary interest, but I am also working on other problems having to due with ice sheet modeling, particularly the temperature distribution in ice sheets. A quick list of things I am interested in or have worked on follows.
I have located some powerful tools at Los Alamos national Laboratories to do finite element meshing. I am working to develop finite element meshes of Antarctica based on the BEDMAP data sets. These meshes have been locally refined using the surface velocity of the ice. A sample of the resulting mesh can be viewed here . I am developing a fully three dimensional temperature model for ice sheets. I am using a promising C++ library for the finite elements, the Deal II library. I am looking at the hydraulic potentials and runoff under ice sheets to try and determine the location of ice stream cachment areas. I am interested in providing a constraint on the amount of melt water runoff being provided by the Antarctic ice sheet. Here is an interesting movie that shows some of my recent efforts to model the erosional processes that may be taking place in the till under icestreams (4.5 MB mpeg4 codec).
