Tuesday 08 Oct: British Antarctic Survey – 15:00-16:00
Venue: British Antarctic Survey, Room 187.
Speaker: Pippa Whitehouse, University of Durham.
Title: Opening the black box: Glacial Isostatic Adjustment (GIA) modelling in Antarctica.
If you have a question about this talk, please contact Rosie Williams.
If you are coming from outside BAS please let the organiser know in advance to gain access to the building
Abstract: Glacial Isostatic Adjustment (GIA) modelling – the study of how the earth system responds to surface load changes during a glacial cycle – can seem a little bit like a black box. In this talk I will open up that box, and describe the underlying physical processes that we are trying to model, some unexpected feedbacks between these processes, and discuss the data that we use to constrain and tune GIA models in Antarctica. There is growing recognition that, in order to tease out the signal of present-day ice mass change from gravity and altimetry observations, we need to carefully account for the residual GIA signal that is associated with past ice mass changes. I will discuss cutting edge approaches to quantifying this signal and outline a few outstanding issues, most of which will need to be tackled via an inter-disciplinary approach.