Leah Bargnesi

Midgard Glacier Image Credit: Jeremy Harbeck, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

My dog Presley and myself.

Hello! I am a senior in the Environmental Geosciences major. I joined the Glacier Modeling lab last Spring semester, so I have now been a part of the lab for two semesters. I feel like I have come a long way from when I began my research here, and at the same time I still have a lot more to learn. I am becoming more and more familiar with using Google Earth Engine (GEE) and JavaScript in general. My goals for my future have slightly changed from when I started. I would still like to be involved with research in some aspect, but my plans for the near future are to get my masters studying sustainability.

Currently, I am looking at the Midgard glacier in Southeastern Greenland and figuring out when and why it separated into another glacier. I am doing this by studying the terminuses of Midgard each year and how they changed. I am working with a dataset of ice flow velocity. I was able to focus the data onto Midgard only by clipping the data to that region. Then I focused in on smaller areas of data, by creating buffers, at each terminus and one above the terminuses. Once I displayed, on the map, the terminuses’ position from 2000 to 2008, it appeared that there was a separation around 2005-2008. My next steps are to determine the exact date when this separation occurred and see if it has to do with the terminuses changing. I am working on getting the dataset into buffers that I created and plotting them in a chart.

This is Midgard glacier with an overlay of the velocity dataset. The points on the map are where I chose to put the buffers, and the squiggly lines are the terminuses.
A screenshot of the code I have generated so far. This is the summer Scene on the map. The code however is only showing the winter scene. Next step is creating an animation!
This is the summer Scene on the map. The code however is only showing the winter scene. –> This was what I was working on last semester when I was learning the basics of JavaScript and GEE.

To share a little more information about me: I have five siblings, a kitty named George (who also goes by Mr. Kitty) and a doggo named Presley. Whenever I have free time, I enjoy (attempting to) drawing on my digital art tablet that I share with my younger sisters, reading books or webtoons, and of course walking Presley:)