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Wednesday, January 27, 2021 4:30pm to 5:30pm
About this Event
Dr. Holschuh will lecture on, "Can Maxwell help us predict future sea level rise?"
Earth’s ice sheets store enough water to raise global sea level by over 70 meters. But the timing and magnitude of ice loss over the coming decades is uncertain, not just because our own future emissions are hard to predict, but because we lack knowledge of some of the fundamental characteristics controlling the ice sheet response to climate change. Glacier behavior, forced by the ocean and atmosphere, is governed by a range of subsurface processes and properties that we cannot measure directly: ice deformation, material properties and failure modes at the interface between ice and rock, the generation and distribution of heat throughout the ice volume, and the production and transport of subglacial meltwater. To address these unknowns, we leverage classical field theory to probe the subsurface remotely. In this talk, I will discuss two novel applications of radar in glaciology and demonstrate how radio waves can be used to help infer the material strength of both ice and the ice sheet substrate, in an effort to better constrain prognostic models of ice sheets.
Biography: Nick got his Bachelor’s in Geology and Economics at Carleton College, in Northfield MN. He went on to get his Ph.D. in Geosciences at Penn State University, where he studied the dynamics of Antarctic glaciers using acoustic and radio waves. After a postdoc at the University of Washington and three research campaigns to Antarctica, he started as an assistant professor of Geology at Amherst College in fall 2021.
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If you are interested in attending this seminar, email sullivam@reed.edu for the zoom link.