ICEMAN

Goals

The ICEMAN (Ice Management) Team addresses one of the core issues in existing sea-level rise and climate change predictive models – what is the correct glacial ice melting rate to use? Currently, the magnitudes of predicted sea level rise by different models can differ from each other by a factor of two to five times. The large uncertainties make climate adaptation and mitigation efforts difficult. Our focus here is to advance the understanding of glacial-ocean interactions via detailed laboratory experiments using state-of-the-art techniques in experimental fluid mechanics. Using the collected data, we seek to develop physics-informed and computationally efficient models to predict the impacts of melting glaciers on ocean circulations, climate, sea level rise, and biodiversity in polar regions

Issues Involved or Addressed

To understand the hydrodynamic interactions and their effects on heat and salt transfer between subglacial plumes and ice sheets, and to develop general predictive models for these interactions. Specifically, our team works on the following topics: 1. How does mixing between a subglacial plume and an initial smooth vertical ice face affect mass, heat, and salt transfer at the ice-seawater interface? 2. How does ice morphology (roughness), seawater density stratification, seawater turbulence, and subglacial plume source configurations affect transport processes at the ice-seawater interface? 3. Which turbulence closure models and parameterizations are needed to accurately predict mass loss from ice sheets in a typical regional ocean circulation model (e.g., MITgcm)? How does this parameterization depend on the ice geometry, density stratification, subglacial plumes and model resolution?

Partners/Sponsors

PI Lai (the proposer) has an active research project funded by NSF to study the melting of glaciers.