Ice streams: fantastic beasts and how to model them

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Elisa Mantelli, Princeton University
• Wednesday 03 June 2020, 16:00-17:00
• British Antarctic Survey, Zoom.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Louis Couston.

The talk will be online. Contact the host to get Zoom details.

Flow organization into systems of narrow, fast-flowing ice streams, is a well-known feature of ice sheets. A quintessential aspect of these ice streams is that they can emerge spontaneously out of an otherwise uniform flow, self-organize in evenly spaced patterns, and switch on and off over time, with major implications for the mass balance of ice sheets. While these dynamics render ice streams fascinating, they are also deeply troublesome. In fact, our understanding of the physics driving them is far from complete, thus impeding attempts to model future ice sheet behavior numerically over timescales longer than a few decades. In this talk, I strip away much of the sophistication involved in `operational’ ice sheet models to look at the necessary ingredients to capture ice stream dynamics in minimal continuum models. I will first identify the basic feedbacks responsible for oscillations in streaming flow, and how natural variability in climate forcing affects them. I will then delve into the spatial dynamics of ice streams, outlining how ice flow localization into distinct ice streams may emerge as an instability of the transition in space from a frozen ice sheet bed, where no sliding can occur, to a temperate one, where sliding dominates the motion of the ice.

This talk is part of the British Antarctic Survey - Polar Oceans seminar series series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• Biology
• British Antarctic Survey
• British Antarctic Survey, Zoom
• Cambridge Environment
• Climate Science Seminars within Cambridge
• Featured lists
• Life Sciences
• Life Sciences
• ME Seminar
• Queens' College Politics Society
• School of Physical Sciences
• Talks related to atmosphere and ocean dynamics and climate science
• my_list
• ob366-ai4er
• other talks

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.