Kristin Poinar wrote a review for a new book by Elizabeth Rush, called The Quickening. In this memoir, Elizabeth Rush explores the melting of Thwaites Glacier, Antarctica, and the decision to have a child in the face of the climate crisis.
Read the review here on American Scientist blog!
It was a beautiful and unseasonably warm Sunday, so we joined together for a lovely walk in the woods. Eighteen Mile Creek is a short hike (not 18 miles!!) along a canyon rim within a half hour’s drive of the UB campus. We all enjoyed the time outdoors and the break from Sunday homework.
From left to right: Naureen, Kristin, Jess, Courtney, Leah, Hannah, Jorge, Eric, and Donglai. Leah and Donglai are touching shale concretions, which were all over in the creek and on the canyon walls.
We also noticed New Zealand mud snails in the creek — tiny (~5 mm) invasive snails that anchored themselves to the stream bed in fast-flowing areas.
The geology in the canyon walls is Wanakah Shale, which was deposited in the middle Devonian (~385 million years ago). It is full of fossils — trilobites, crinoid stems, and brachiopods — but we did not go looking for these. A local fossil hunting site, Penn Dixie, is the place to go for that!
The United States Department of Energy (DOE) featured a story about Courtney Shafer, currently a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab and soon to start her PhD at the UB Glacier Modeling Lab.
Courtney was awarded a prestigious PhD fellowship from the DOE, the Computational Science Graduate Fellowship.
Argemino Barro, a New York-based journalist, interviewed Kristin Poinar for El Ágora, the first Spanish-speaking media entirely devoted to water and climate change. His article is about the future of the Greenland Ice Sheet.
We had our first and only in-person lab meeting of Spring 2021. It was a brisk spring day on UB’s South Campus, where none of us had ever spent much time. We took a walk around and even spied the Mackay Tower, where a pair of peregrine falcons make their nest. (UB has a webcam — UB Falcon Cam — highly recommended viewing in April through the end of May.)
Jeremy Stock gave a short talk at the Buffalo Association of Professional Geologists, as part of a Scholarship Event, in spring 2020. The BAPG was prescient and kind enough to share the presentations on the web. Take it away, Jeremy!
Jeremy Stock successfully defended his MS thesis, “Modeled Patterns of Crevassing Induced by Supraglacial Lake Drainage in Western Greenland”, and turned in a very nice dissertation this May. Congratulations, Jeremy!
Abstract:
The Greenland Ice Sheet is expected to contribute substantially to global sea level rise over the next century in response to climate change. As increasing volumes of surface meltwater are delivered to the glacier bed via moulins during supraglacial lake drainage events, it has been hypothesized that new crevasses may form upflow, causing a cascade of lake drainages. This upflow expansion could alter ice sheet dynamics, leading to ice sheet instability and even greater sea level rise contributions. To investigate this hypothesis, we applied an analytical ice-flow model (Gudmundsson, 2008) to calculate surface strain rates and infer the pattern of crevassing induced by a modeled rapidly drained lake. We calibrate the model using data collected during a lake drainage event in the summer of 2011 in the Pakitsoq region of Western Greenland. The patterns and extent of crevassing we see in our model results are highly dependent on the bed topography, basal sliding ratio, dimensions of the slipperiness patch, and the seasonal timing of the drainage event. Our model results show evidence of considerable crevassing occurring within 3-5.5 km upstream of the modeled lake drainage, with crevassing enhanced by a factor of 5-6 within a 3 km radius of the rapidly drained lake. Because lakes in this area are spaced by roughly 2-4 km, our results support the hypothesis for cascading lake drainage. This research improves our understanding of how meltwater may affect ice sheet dynamics, which are a major factor in how much the Greenland Ice Sheet will contribute to sea level rise in the future.
G. H. Gudmundsson. Analytical solutions for the surface response to small amplitude perturbations in boundary data in the shallow-ice-stream approximation. The Cryosphere, 2(2):77–93, 2008. http://doi.org/10.5194/tc-2-77-2008
A few figure excerpts:
I was fortunate to be invited to give a public lecture at the Carnegie Science Institute in Washington, DC as part of their Carnegie Capital Science evening lecture series. It was a fantastic experience!
Each summer, a volume of water equivalent to 10 Chesapeake Bays melts off of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Much of this meltwater reaches the ocean, but its path is neither direct nor simple. On its way, the meltwater interacts with the glacier itself in ways that can affect ice flow and further sea-level rise. Dr. Poinar uses numeric models and remotesensing observations to understand the water-ice interactions that affect the glacier’s long-term behavior. She will discuss her analyses of water systems — including large meltwater lakes and rivers that form on top of the ice, aquifers within the ice, deep crevasses that move water from these systems through the glacier to its base, and the water flow networks that develop under the glacier — that change the flow speed and patterns of the ice on its slow, or sometimes not-so-slow, journey to the ocean. Ultimately, Dr. Poinar wants to discover: how much is the Greenland Ice Sheet likely to raise sea levels and how fast will it happen?
A top-notch video recording of the lecture is available at https://carnegiescience.edu/greenland.