Joshua Charlton

Summary

Welcome to my page! I am in my final semester as an MS student in the UB Glacier Modeling Lab, where I’ve been learning about ice canyons in Greenland. These features transport meltwater across the ice sheet surface to the interior, bed, margin, or ocean, yet little is known about how they form and change over time. My research asks: Where on the ice sheet do canyons form, and how long does this take? What are the requisite climatic and fluvial conditions that enable ice canyon development? How wide and deep do mature ice canyons become? To explore these questions, I am building a numeric model in MATLAB that simulates the life cycle of an ice canyon. The model is supported by observations of ice canyon geometry from WorldView and ICESat-2 satellite data.

I grew up in Easton, Pennsylvania and earned my BA in Environmental Geoscience from The College of Wooster in Ohio. There, I modeled the advance of Alaska’s Columbia Glacier (https://openworks.wooster.edu/independentstudy/8476/). When I’m not troubleshooting MATLAB code you can find me laying down the low notes on my tuba or browsing a used book store.

Feel free to contact me at jdcharlt@buffalo.edu

Research Description (section in progress)