ice sheets

What drives ice sheet dynamics?

The Ice Dynamics Lab at UT-Austin seeks to understand how glaciers and ice sheets respond to both natural and forced (human-induced) variability in climate. We are interested in the physical processes that drive ice sheet flow, with a particular focus on fast-moving ice streams and outlet glaciers of Earth’s major ice sheets. These fast-moving regions are sensitive to unknown boundary conditions (ice-ocean and ice-bed) and we focus our work on obtaining observations at these boundaries in order to push forward improvements to ice sheet models. Performing field work for understanding these boundary conditions is challenging as direct observations are difficult to obtain. Work in the group thus seeks to employ alternative cutting-edge techniques to study ice dynamics in these regions. These include novel in-situ observational campaigns, computation, and the use of machine learning to effectively mine the ‘big data’ made available from satellite remote sensing.