A team of handpicked experts is studying intricate processes to better understand glaciers and sea-level rise.
Last month a new projection of sea-level rise by the year 2050 spurred headlines showing more coastal cities around the world will be submerged than earlier models have predicted. Just how fast and how high sea levels rise globally will be determined by the melting of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. However, the acceleration, retreat and thinning of glaciers where they meet ocean water are still understood poorly.
“Our model projections for how ice sheets change are probably underestimates,” said primary investigator Leigh Stearns, KU associate professor of geology and researcher with the Center for the Remote Sensing of Ice Sheets (CReSIS). “There’s a lot about the physics of glaciers that we don’t understand. It doesn’t mean that we can’t model them closely, but we’re missing things. So, our estimates for sea-level rise have pretty big uncertainty, and that’s mostly due to the contribution from ice because we are not able to constrain those processes very well. In order to do that, we really need detailed investigations of glaciers to try to pin down these relationships better. I would say we don’t even really know if the ocean is pushing most of the change of the ice sheet, or if it’s the atmosphere — and there are people in our community who would argue both ways, very strongly. That’s a pretty fundamental question we haven’t really solved yet.”
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