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Michelle Babcock

Proposal: Improving constraints and bridging the gap between terrestrial and planetary subglacial hydrology

Full research grant proposal available upon request. First 4 pages sample available here:



Introduction

Around 99% of Earth’s fresh water is stored in the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets (Otosaka et al., 2023). Global mean average sea level (GMSL) rise of just 1m would put hundreds of millions of people worldwide at risk for coastal flooding(Kulp and Strauss, 2019), and GMSL rose faster in the 20th century than any other century in the past 3000 years (Fox-Kemper et al., 2021). Seeteram et al. estimated that between 88 M to 1.4 B people globally will face displacement induced by sea level rise by 2100 (Seeteram et al., 2023). By 2100, GMSL is projected to rise by 0.63-1.02m relative to the 1995-2014 average if global greenhouse emissions continue on a high emissions pathway (Fox-Kemper et al., 2021). Ice mass loss across Antarctica and Greenland has increased six fold in the past three decades, and accounts for a significant amount of mean sea level rise and increased worldwide flood risk (Otosaka et al., 2023; Kulp and Strauss, 2019). The majority of ice mass loss in Antarctica occurs in the WAIS, which accounted for 37 ±19 Gt/yr from 1992-1996, 131±21 Gt/yr between 2012-2016, and slightly slowed to 94±25 Gt/yr from between 2017 and 2020 (Otosaka et al., 2023).


Figure 1: Cumulative ice mass change and seal-level rise since 1992, calculated from The Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise (IMBIE). The data shows that Greenland as a whole has been losing the most ice mass in the past several decades..(Otosaka et al., 2023)
Figure 1: Cumulative ice mass change and seal-level rise since 1992, calculated from The Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise (IMBIE). Dashed lines are results from previous assessments (IMBIE-2).(Otosaka et al., 2023)

Located at the WAIS, Thwaites Glacier is one of the largest contributors to Antarctic mass loss (Yu et al., 2018; Hager et al., 2022), and the adjoining Pine Island Glacier is responsible for the most global mean sea-level rise of any Antarctic glacier in the past few decades (Reed et al., 2024; Rignot et al., 2019). Ice sheet models along with past trends are used to predict sea level rise in the future (Sweet et al., 2022). Subglacial hydrology influences the speed of ice sheets (Stearns et al., 2008), yet uncertainties remain about subglacial hydrology and material bed properties at the ice-bed environment beneath Thwaites and Pine Island (Hager et al., 2022; Koellner et al., 2019).


Research questions

  1. How does topographic roughness a↵ect channelized and distributed flow at the ice- bed environment, and how sensitive is subglacial hydrology routing to bed roughness uncertainty?

  2. Can Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) geostatistical simulation methods be used to improve constraints on subglacial topography and hydrological conditions beneath Thwaites and Pine Island?

  3. How can MCMC geostatistical simulation methods be applied to subglacial hydrology modeling to improve the characterization of an inferred subglacial Martian lake?

Image by Jr Korpa
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