Cohort 6

Isabelle Wicks

Project Title:

A slippery situation? Modelling the impact of surface melt on Antarctic ice shelf stability.

Supervisory Team:

Dr Sammie Buzzard (principal – Northumbria University)

Others TBC.

Bio:

Since before my undergraduate studies, I have been interested in studying in vulnerable cold environments, such as Antarctica and High Mountain Asia, where glacial and ice shelf dynamics play a crucial role in moderating atmospheric warming and global climate change. Through studying geophysics, I have utilised both field-based and remote sensing methods to understand Earth processes, which has developed my interest in understanding global responses to our changing climate. My Masters research involved using remote sensing data to analyse proglacial lake behaviours in High Mountain Asia through time, and to understand how, if at all, they are related to current climate processes. Through this, I became passionate about utilising computational methods to understand complex cryological processes, which I will continue to research during my PhD project, utilising numerical models to understand and forecast surface melt Antarctic ice sheets.

Project overview

In recent decades, ice shelves in Antarctica have experienced rapid disintegration and collapse, resulting in a loss of associated buttressing forces from the ice shelves and increased glacial flow velocities. Increasing glacier and ice shelf mass loss in Antarctica has contributed to global sea level rise, a trend that is projected to continue throughout the next century under current climate conditions. One key mechanism that is thought to lead to rapid disintegration is the surface melt of ice shelves, leading to surface thinning and hydrofracture (Banwell et al., 2013; Bell et al., 2018). Furthermore, the formation, draining, and freeze-thaw cycles of these lakes alter the density profile of the ice shelf, and lead to flexure-induced fracturing due to the repeated stress placed on the ice (Buzzard et al., 2018). Large interannual variability in Antarctic seasonal melt makes forecasting trends in melt volume difficult when based on past data alone; however, the incorporation of melt and ice loss dynamics into numerical models provides an opportunity to robustly test ice shelf vulnerability in all future climate scenarios. This project aims to quantify the long-term impact of increasing surface melt on Antarctic ice shelf stability, using finite-flow and high-fidelity surface hydrology models to understand how supraglacial lakes and drainage networks impact vulnerable ice shelves across Antarctica.

Education:

MGeophys, BSc Geophysical Sciences – University of Leeds, 2019-2023

Skills:

Big data, Python, numerical analysis, geophysical fieldwork

Hobbies:

Cooking, music, piano, weightlifting, reading