Rasmus Pedersen (NBI postdoc), Anne-Katrine Faber (UiB postdoc) and Henning Åkesson (UiB PhD) at EGU 2017.
Ice2ice was well represented at this years European Geophysical meeting (EGU). 14,496 scientists from 107 countries participated in the meeting, of which 53% were early career scientists (under the age of 35 years).
Over the course of the 5 day long meeting, ice2ice contributed heavily with 4 sessions:
Quaternary climate archives and proxy uncertainty (Nora and Hening)
The state-of-the-art in ice coring sciences (co-organized) (Paul)
Understanding, representing and communicating earth system processes in weather and climate (Jens)
Decadal to millennial scale climate variability of the late Quaternary (Joel, Helle, Mari, Kerim, Markus, Ruth)
Many people was present during the ice2ice session: Decadal to millennial scale climate variability of the late Quaternary
Besides the high number of sessions with ice2ice conveners, ice2ice contributed more than 20 talks and a similar number of posters. A close to full list of ice2ice contributions by day can be found here.
Prior to the EGU 2017 meeting. Ice2ice people met up in Bergen to prepare the talks.
Further ice2ice was represented in the EGU cinema, where the movies created by ice2ice was each shown twice over the course of the week. You can watch the movies here in case you missed them at EGU.
Finally on wednesday a social was held for ice2ice people and friends. More than 50 people joined.
As part of a focus week on climate change at the danish national radio ice2ice researcher Ruth Mottram sat down and explained her 6 yr old kid Sofia about climate change and the consequences for Sofias future.
Similarly ice2ice Primary investigator had a talk with his nieces Siri and Marie, who are 9 and 11 years old.
The two-day Ice2Ice NEGIS workshop took place in end of March in Bergen city, Norway. The focus on the workshop was the North Eastern Greenland Ice Stream (NEGIS); ice-ocean interactions in the past and the present.
ice2ice researcher Ruth Mottram on Surface Mass Balance of the NEGIS ice stream. Since the meeting was hold in Bergen the pointer was an umbrella!
We were 29 participants, with many new faces to the Ice2Ice network, from Norway, Denmark, Germany, the US, and UK. Both the cryosphere, atmosphere and ocean’s influence of the dynamic of the ice stream was discussed during the two days. NEGIS is a key player to understand the dynamic of the Greenland Ice Sheet, since is drains a large portion of the ice sheet, and its interaction with the surrounding ocean (e.g. fresh water fluxes) and atmosphere (e.g. surface mass balance), which all are important for the research questions of the Ice2Ice project.
The format of the workshop allowed the participants to present data, which provided a good basis for further discussion, where we both discussed the NEGIS in the past, but also the recent changes in the NEGIS region, both in the ocean, the atmosphere and for the ice itself.
The goal of the workshop was to find out what groups are doing of research at NEGIS and start collaboration. There was many opportunities for the first mentioned during the two days of presentations, while there was an opportunity to start collaboration up by latter during both days of walk-and-talk sessions in the nearby park.
The outcome of the workshop was that we will probably have a next NEGIS workshop in connection with Dorthe’s IceFlow project in Copenhagen. Here we will decide if we want to write a community paper with all of the questions that came out over the workshop. If you are an ice2ice collaborator you can find the questions in the summary of the workshop in the ice2ice dropbox folder.
Thirteen people from the Bjerknes Centre and Ice2Ice partners participated in a safety course at Folgefonna 29–31 March. The goal was to prepare the crew that will work on the EastGRIP drilling station in northeastern Greenland the coming summers. Instructed by guides from Folgefonni breførarlag, the participants learned about glacier safety and safe travel in the mountains.
The course started with a nine-hour hike to Fonnabu (1450 m.a.s.l.), getting above the heavy fog just in time to see the sunset and the glacier. The next day, strong winds made the living-room the obvious place for practicing knots and pulleys. The weather later improved enough to allow more realistic rescue operations – not in a crevasse, but in a small slope behind the cabin. Anyone who have tried to drag people up a hill will know that this is by no means less strenuous. The last day was spent getting down from Fonnabu and at the shooting range in Jondal.
From March 13th thru 17th, #ice2ice researchers from Copenhagen and Bergen and a handful of guests from around the world convened in Myrkdalen, Norway, to discuss what the project has achieved to date and how to move forward. As an American PhD student visiting the University of Copenhagen, I was lucky enough to join the Annual Meeting and get a first-hand look at the groundbreaking science the Ice2Ice team is doing.
The Annual Meeting took place at the bottom of this impressive ski slope.
My first experience with Ice2Ice was in January 2017, when I joined a group of 15 other students at a the week-long ice2ice PhD Bootcamp. I spent that week together with four other PhD students working on ice velocity data from the floating ice tongue of 79ºN Glacier in Northeast Greenland. During the week in January, we were able to accomplish quite a lot, most importantly developing a flexible method for determining the stresses and strains in the floating ice tongue using different datasets. The Annual Meeting in Myrkdalen gave us a chance to get feedback from our mentors and peers and discuss a realistic timeline for moving forward with the project, both of which are invaluable as we work towards publishing our results.
My bootcamp group getting input on our project from Ice2Ice Scientists.
Although I came to the Ice2Ice meeting to help present my work from the ice2ice PhD bootcamp, I ended up getting much more out of it than I anticipated. Highlights were hearing about ongoing work to understand how the mass balance of the Greenland ice sheet has changed over the last 10,000 years, and to what extent these changes are linked to variations in sea ice. During plenary sessions at the Annual Meeting we discussed how the project has already begun to characterize how changes to the ice sheet and the sea ice affect atmospheric circulation and global climate. Continuing to study these processes is critical for improving our ability to forecast future climate change as Arctic ice cover, on land and in the ocean, continues to shrink. But for me, the most exciting discussions were “off-the-record.” Coffee breaks and afternoon pauses were a great time to catch up with Ice2Ice glaciologists and discuss wild ideas about the past history and future changes to the Greenland ice sheet. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I will say, I look forward to collaborating with scientists from Bergen and Copenhagen long after my visit to Europe ends.
A lot of time was spent talking science at the Annual Meeting, with discussions often spilling over into our shared mealtimes. But it would be a shame (and utterly non-Norwegian!) to travel to such a beautiful place and spend the entire week in a conference room. Our brains brimming with thoughts of Greenland and Dansgaard–Oeschger Events, many of us spent part of the afternoon hitting the slopes. Threatening low clouds and periodic rain would normally have kept me from skiing, but in my experience, it’s hard to spend any time in Norway without really wanting to be outside. And besides, as some of my colleagues liked to remind me, there’s no such thing as bad weather, you just need the right clothes!
Visiting PhD Benjamin Keisling (me!) getting some fresh air in between science sessions.
Glaciers in Greenland lose mass by melt and runoff, by calving and by submarine melt that happens at the front of outlet glaciers that terminate in the ocean. Submarine melt occurs because the ocean water is (relatively) warmer than the ice, but it goes much faster where there is turbulent water mixing the layers by the glacier. Probably the most important source of turbulence are plumes of water that emerge at the base of the glacier where it terminates in the fjord. The water is generated by melting mostly at the surface though also at the bed of the glacier. Meltwater flows like rivers through systems of englacial channels to finally arrive at the bed where it makes its way, eventually, to the end of the glacier.
Unfortunately these channels are pretty hard to map, and there are lakes and areas at the bed where water can be stored. The plumes themselves are rather hazardous to observe as they are often inaccessible and in front of actively calving sections of the glacier. There have been a few studies, but often these are snapshots in time and it is difficult to assess how important these processes are to the overall mass budget of the ice sheet.
Therefore we have to turn to models to work out how important plume processes are for submarine melt. In our recent paper with Slater et al (2017), we contributed data from the HIRHAM5 RCM to look at runoff within a catchment in Greenland. The case study was based at Kangiata Nunata Sermia glacier, in the Godthåbsfjord area of south western Greenland. It’s a relatively accessible glacier showing many of the common processes for Greenland outlet glaciers and has a fair bit of data available. The Langen et al (2014) paper showed that HIRHAM5 performs pretty well in terms of modelled runoff in this region.
The modelled runoff was used in two different models of subglacial plumes, including one implemented in MITgcm, in order to determine what configuration of subglacial hydrology and plume distribution along the ice front was most likely. The models were compared with a time lapse photos of the ice front showing plume activity at the surface.
Fig. 1. Illustrations of plume state classification. (a) Plume state=−1, ice tongue present. (b) Plume state= 0, no ice tongue and no surface expression of a plume. (c) Plume state= 1, plume visible adjacent to glacier terminus but is contained within a few hundred metres of the terminus. (d) Plume state= 2, plume visible and flows down-fjord at surface for a number of kilometres.
For a large proportion of the summer, the modelled catchment runoff greatly exceeds the discharge required to create a plume that would reach the fjord surface, yet there are extended periods when there is no plume visible from the time lapse pictures. This can only be explained by the runoff emerging into the fjord in a spatially distributed fashion. In the paper we therefore argue that subglacial drainage near the glacier terminus is often spatially distributed, formed either from numerous point sources of subglacial discharge, or a single but very wide subglacial channel or possibly a complex combination of the two.
There are two implications from this work. Firstly, a more spatially distributed submarine plume gives a higher total melt than a single concentrated plume but this melt rate is still unable to explain the mass loss at the terminus when considering the ice velocity at the terminus, suggesting that calving is still the most important mass flux term at this glacier. Secondly, the modelling study found that the distributed hydrology, suggested by the results leads to a more direct ice flow response to high surface melt rates and this response most likely scales with catchment size.
Probably the most important result to come out of this study is that longer time series of observations of plumes, in combination with the modelled runoff lead to a dramatically different understanding of key processes within the fjords when compared to those suggested by simple snapshot observations in earlier studies.
Fig. 2. (a) Air temperature from KNS1 and NUKL PROMICE stations. (b) Modelled runoff. HIRHAM5 (orange) delays runoff using a parameterisation based on surface slope. PDD model (green) assumes instantaneous runoff. PDD delay (pink) uses a transit velocity of 0.05 m s−1 from point of production to the terminus. PDD rapid (purple) uses a transit velocity of 1 m s−1. The green curve has been smoothed using a 3 d moving window, the pink and purple curves using a 6 h moving window. Large discrepancies between HIRHAM5 and the PDD model arise due to rainfall events (e.g. days 177 and 181). (c) KNS1 daily ice velocity. (d) Plume state as described in Figure1.
The 11th of February was the UN international day of women and girls in science.
Both ice2ice postdoc Helle Astrid Kjær and DMI researcher Ruth Mottram has been very active tweeting about ice2ice activities (@H_A_Kjaer and @ruth_mottram) and have also used the #actuallivingscientist, which is used to describe what scientist actually work with. This was picked up by ScienceNordic, which is a news media for Nordic science. They used the two tweets from Helle and Ruth in their article on 11th of February celebrating UN international day of women and girls in science.
The full article can be found here , a danish version was published at videnskab.dk can be found here. The news story also featured in the large danish newspaper Jyllandsposten.
Paul Valleonga and Ray Bradley discussing Greenland temperature trends from lake sediments and ice cores.
The 3-day Ice2Ice Holocene workshop took place from the 23rd to the 25th of January in Dronningmølle, DK. 26 participants mainly from the Ice2Ice network were involved in a dynamic exchange of knowledge and ideas on the climate of the Holocene epoch as seen from different records. The format of the workshop was open and informal something that allowed for more discussions than talks and allowed the participants to present data and ideas.
Audrey Morley giving a potential explanation of the Holocene climate changes by changes in the position of the atmospheric jet, which could be driven by changes in the latitudinal temperature gradient.
The 2 invited talks from Audrey Morley (National University of Ireland, Galway) and Camilla Andersen (Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland) initiated a fruitful exchange of ideas while talks by Martin Miles, Kerstin Perner, Vasileios Gkinis and Trond Dokken gave an overview of the data based picture of the Holocene climate as it is seen in ice and marine cores. Some of the discussions particularly focused on seemingly common climate signals around the mid Holocene and resulted in the initiation of future collaborations and projects integrating climate records focusing in that particular period. There also seems to be anticipation in the promising Bromine records that Niccolo and Paul are working on, the upcoming NEEM water isotope diffusion reconstruction by Vasileios and the planned transient Holocene run by Kerim with focus on the Scandinavian pattern. Future strategies on tephra studies have also been the subject of a discussion on Tuesday evening.
The tephra team in discussion of future strategies
The second edition of the Ice2Ice PhD bootcamp recently came to an end, this time held in Geilo in the midst of the Norwegian winter, a couple of hundred kilometers to the east of Bergen. Based on the idea that each PhD student should benefit, in term of hers/his own project, from collaborating with other students working on related problems, the fourteen participating PhD students were divided into three groups several months prior to bootcamp. Within each group, a project was defined and sufficient preparations were made on beforehand such that the bootcamp week provided the ideal surroundings and time to work intensively on the project, and to answer the related scientific questions.
Photo: Martin Olesen
One group worked on the momentum balance of the Northeast Greenland Ice Stream (NEGIS) outlet glaciers and had a specific emphasize on the potential back-resistance provided by the glacier tongue. Another group investigated the possibility to establish a self-sustained extensive sea ice cover in the North Atlantic in a coupled general circulation model by assimilating sea ice in an energetically consistent way. The last group focused on comparisons of proxy records obtained from sediment- and ice cores, specifically sea ice reconstructions based on Bromine enrichment as seen from the Greenland ice sheet and concentrations in sediments of organic matter from diatoms that live below the sea ice edge. Each group were guided by a mentor of their own choice, who were either available through a web connection throughout the week or were present at the bootcamp itself.
Photo: Mads Poulsen
Besides the group work, the bootcamp also hosted scientific talks by mentors Rasmus Anker Pedersen (PostDoc, Centre for Ice and Climate) and Lars Henrik Smedsrud (Professor, University of Bergen) as well as student-organized seminars on plotting possibilities with python and GMT, and proxy interpretations and uncertainties. The week culminated with a presentation by each group on the results obtained during the bootcamp and on the possible prospects.
Photo: Martin Olesen
Despite the military discipline which is associated with a bootcamp, the week did allow for a few cultural and social inputs. The owner of the bootcamp venue gave a brief introduction to the Hardanger fiddle, a delicate Norwegian instrument, and during Thursday a couple of hours of break were taken away from science as the groups went for a 5km dog sledge ride in the outskirt of Geilo.
The results from the three groups, as well as the perspectives and the possibilities to integrate the projects further into the Ice2Ice synergy, will be presented on the all-staff meeting in Myrkdalen in March.
