News

The Antarctic Research Centre, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, is offering a fully funded scholarship for an enthusiastic and talented Ph.D student to undertake numerical ice-sheet modelling research. Experiments will focus on better understanding and simulating the processes involved in ice-sheet – ocean interactions. Such processes determine the basal mass balance of marine-based ice-sheets such as the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and as such, control the pattern and timing of grounding-line migrations.

A new paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by J. Feldmann and A. Levermann, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, uses PISM simulations to show that nearly-complete WAIS collapse is triggered by present-day melt rates in the Amundsen Sea. Modeled WAIS deglaciation follows after relatively-short (60–200a) periods in which the present-day sub-shelf (i.e. ocean-caused) melt rates are sustained.

As a result of the buzz around Winkelmann et al. (2015)’s modeling of the effect of full conversion of available fossil fuels in the ground into atmospheric CO2, using PISM for determining ice dynamics/response timescale, on 5 October our local paper the Fairbanks Daily News Miner featured PISM. The content is a bit warped by scientist-to-journalist transmission issues, but we are happy to have local recognition of this UAF-lead project!

See the official position announcement here.

A new open-access paper by Ricarda Winkelmann and others uses PISM to address an admittedly extreme question: If all currently-attainable fossil fuel resources are converted to atmospheric greenhouse gases, what happens to the Antarctic Ice Sheet?