PROJECT OVERVIEW

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The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) contains 2 million cubic kilometers of ice and the global scientific community considers it the most significant risk for coastal environments and cities facing future sea level rise. The risk posed by the WAIS arises from its deep, marine-based setting, with ice situated on reverse bed slopes prone to significant and prolonged retreat. Although scientists have been aware of the precarious setting of the WAIS since the early 1970s, it is only now becoming apparent that the flow of ice in several large drainage basins is undergoing dynamic change, which is consistent with, although not certain to be, the inception of a prolonged and potentially unstoppable disintegration. Understanding WAIS stability and enabling more accurate prediction of sea level rise through realistic simulation of ice flow in large-scale models are two of the fundamental global challenges facing the scientific community today. In TIME, we directly address both challenges by A) using frontier technologies to observe rapidly deforming shear margins hypothesized to exert strong control on the future evolution of Thwaites Glacier, and B) using observational record to develop parameterizations for important processes which are not yet implemented in ice sheet models used to predict WAIS contribution to sea level rise.

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TIME is a collaborative project involving scientists at six different universities including University of Texas at El Paso, University of California Santa Cruz, Stanford University, University of Oklahoma, Cambridge University (UK) and Leeds University (UK) first submitted our proposal to the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the National Environment Research Council (NERC) in early 2017, so this project has been several years in the vision and planning stages already. The field season planning escalated about 6 months ago and has involved numerous phone calls with our TIME science team and USAP to discuss logistics and possibilities.

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The primary Principal Investigators for the entire project are Slawek Tulacyzk (Univ. of California at Santa Cruz) and Poul Christoffersen (Cambridge University).

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TIME is part of the larger International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC), which includes eight NSF-NERC-funded science projects to study Thwaites Glacier, Antarctica. For more information about ITGC, check out the ITGC website.