Dartmouth Events

Changing ice in a warming climate: a data-driven approach

One of the greatest uncertainties in sea-level rise projections arises from our incomplete understanding of how ice sheets would lose mass in a warming climate. In this talk, I will discuss two poorly understood aspects of ice dynamics. The first concerns how the melting of ice surfaces triggers ice-shelf collapse through hydrofracture, which caused the catastrophic disintegration of the Larsen B Ice Shelf. I will introduce a new approach that combines physics-based models and deep learning techniques to provide physical insights into the stability of ice fractures and predict the vulnerability of Antarctic ice shelves to atmospheric warming. In the second part of the talk, I will discuss the complex rheology of Antarctic Ice Shelves. The flow law of ice, i.e., ice rheology, directly governs the dynamics of ice shelves but is challenging to measure in the field. Here, with physics-informed deep learning and remote-sensing observations, we identify flow laws that differ from those previously assumed in ice-sheet models. Our results suggest the need to reassess the impact of ice flow laws on the future projection of sea-level rise.