Category: Antarctica

Back at Basen*

LISA is alive! Kind of. We had a really good field test of the system in this, our first week in Antarctica (though thank goodness for satellite wifi connection** to the rest of the world so LISA’s genius creator Helle Kjær could assist in troubleshooting). It was a bit of a struggle and I would say we came out partial winners, with a much deeper understanding of how the box is actually put together and more importantly some really interesting data (yay!) that Clement is busy processing already – I’m very excited to see how it turns out as it will help to direct our following field sorties.

This is the first field deployment of LISA in Antarctica, and even if she didn’t give up all the secrets of the snow, it’s still an achievement worth celebrating that we got half of it, and an interesting half too.

We chose a coring site around 60km from Wasa, so it was a long slow snow-scooter tour up Plogbreen (the plough glacier – named after our neighbouring nunatak Plogen, the plough) and on to the flat plateau of Ritscher Flya at about 1000m elevation.

Wind sculpts snow into ridges called sastrugi. We had quite a bit of fresh snow at this site while we were there. Sometimes it’s hard to work out where the snow surface actually is.

It was a pretty wind and snowy site, in a katabatic wind zone (thankfully not too strong on this trip), which was intentional, as one of the aims of our study is the effects of strong winds on snow accumulation. As preparing to leave took most of the day (especially doing the chemistry mixes for LISA), we headed up in the afternoon and then stayed out overnight in these fantastic little cabins on skis.

Our field camp: sledge full of equipment, the blue cabin on a sledge (an ark) is one of our living quarters and the pyramid shaped, orange Scott tent is our bathroom.

The Polar Research institute in Sweden calls them arks and they are really a very nice solution to the problem of cold and wind and trying to work in quite extreme conditions. Pulled by a snow-scooter and with a stove inside for melting snow and heating, they’re really very cosy to sleep in and it makes a big difference to be able to warm up when for example you’ve been sitting in a snow pit at -15C with a hefty wind chill on top and are covered in spin drift snow (as me how I know).

We were greeted by this beautiful halo around the sun upon waking, with sun dogs on either side, caused by the ice crystals in the sky. In fact we nick-named the site diamond dust because of the clear sky precipitation on the first morning.

We soon got into a good rhythm with Henrik driving the coring, Clement logging and Ninis and myself assisting with the cores.

Starting the first core, (l to r the rest of the field team, Henrik, Clement and Ninis)

And then it was time to get LISA going and a very long and slightly frustrating day followed. Thankfully, by bedtime and having reconstructed quite a lot of the inner tubing of the box, we got LISA ready for work the next day.

The LISA box with melting ice core on top and computer recording the data as it appears. The pop-up fishing tent was essential for working at this site in the cold winds. Without wind chill it was around -10C outside, preventing ice crystals from forming in the chemistry lines and reagents is also a concern, but the arks also simplify things.

I dug a snow pit – always one of my favourite activities, it’s good to get your hands in the snow and really feel what is going on, and we identified some really intriguing layers. Lots more work to be done there to work out what is going on.

As added entertainment, Ninis was interviewed live from the top of the ice sheet by Swedish TV live from the fieldcamp (check out God Morgon Sverige on TV4, 23rd December if you’re interested). However, after 2 nights out it was time to pack up and head back, 3 cores worth of data richer, for a shower, laundry and a Christmas Eve day off.

On Christmas eve daytime it was my turn with a brief 2 minutes to explain our project on Danish TV2 news (at 12.15 CET in case you have an account and would like to see me looking wind swept). Juleaften, Christmas Eve, is the big day of celebration in the Nordic countries, so we took an almost day off, doing some washing, cleaning the living modules and enjoying plenty of good food courtesy of the Swedish chef Raymond who prepared a Christmas dinner feast later, perfect after a long Christmas hike over the nunatak.

Field Photos

Given the current state of the US administration I think it’s worth thinking about what services we use, to become less dependent on US tech and social media companies. Therefore, I’m sharing photos over on pixelfed while we’re out here, in case you want to see more field photos, though sharing is a bit intermittent as it depends on the internet link and due to the expense of the data, we’re trying not to use too much.

I am also posting over on blue sky, though there is much that makes me uneasy about that platform, so I will keep posting on the fediscience server on mastodon too (and indeed the quality of interaction is often better there strangely, given I feel that the platform is smaller than blue sky).

*The Swedish research station Wasa is located on a nunatak in Antarctica called Basen (it’s pronounced Baasen, like the sound a sheep makes in english)

**Yes we are on starlink. It’s incredibly impressive performance wise, but I’d rather not be supporting the nazi man-child, the sooner Eutel Oneweb makes an alternative for users like us, the better, though preferably without this polluting a footprint in low earth orbit. In fact if any EUTEL folks are reading this, I’d be delighted to test out a lightweight system for polar field scientists for you 🙂

Screenshot from satellitemap.space showing the position of the tens of thousands of starlink satellites currently orbiting earth. Check out their visualiser to see other satellites!

Settling in..

It’s been a good start to the field season, incredible competent logistics, great field equipment, super helpful colleagues and incredible food by the station cook. For the first time ever I suspect I’ll be putting on weight in the field. But everything also takes a lot longer in Antarctica so little in the way of actual scientific results to report yet. Nevertheless we’ve some tantalising hints of some interesting processes and we’ve been settling in to the expedition frame of mind.

We had a very good flight from Oslo, a small delay in Prague notwithstanding, very friendly cabin crew and 3 seats each to lie across meant a relatively good sleep and a decent amount of work finalised on route.

Clouds over Namibia’s Etosha National Park. We basically crossed a third of the world to get here. A carbon debt I’ll be paying for years…

Similarly, in Cape Town, mostly spent in a hotel room finishing off reports, except for dinner and an occasional walk. And then a very smooth and easy 5 hour flight first to Troll, to be met by welcoming Norwegian colleagues and a vintage Basler (a DC3 airframe dating back to 1944, but with new engines – I’ve seen it in Greenland before – it still works!), that took us more or less directly to Wasa, where our Swedish colleagues met us on the glacier runway. And what a welcome! Everyone has been extremely helpful and very friendly.

The “vintage” Basler, an unpressurized aircraft. Very fun to fly in and beautiful views..

Operating in Antarctica is a bit like working in Greenland and also not at all like Greenland. In both places you have to be pretty flexible, self reliant and able to work in difficult conditions and across broad teams. It’s just much more extreme in terms of isolation, logistics, costs and everything else here in Antarctica.

The nunataks of Dronning Maud Land: it’s a big and very beautiful place

We are extremely fortunate to be so well- supported by such a great crew and it is important to me that we repay that investment with some excellent science results.

So far though, we’ve been laying the groundwork, getting our safety training done, testing some new coring equipment, unpacking and testing the LISA box and learning how to use the arks (a kind of plastic shell on skis that we will use for camping in while out of the station) and preparing for what I believe is sometimes called “deep field” (perhaps a touch melodramatic for what is basically camping).

Safety training: testing a snow anchor for crevasse rescue purposes

We’ve also tested some new drilling equipment, finding some very interesting firn features in the process, including several thick ice lenses in a region we didn’t expect.

Stacked firn cores on the glacier.

There have been a few anxious moments around our old friend LISA. She is a complex machine with many pieces that can go wrong but finally at 9.30 this evening Clément managed to get her working. In a tiny “lab” but one with a great view. A huge relief all round (and hopefully field operation will be more straightforward now we’ve had some practice).

  Tomorrow will be mostly packing up and preparation for a few days away, so Christmas Eve will likely find us camping out on a glacier somewhere working away. Weather permitting of course. So far we’ve been pretty lucky with that and we need to make the most of it while it lasts.

So that was a quick field update, it’s been pretty busy and a bit weird to think I’ve only been here 3 days so far. I’ve already slipped into field mode and slightly lost track of time.

The next update will probably be after Christmas, but I’m posting pictures as we go along to my pixelfed account. There are also some nice entries on the official iQ2300 expedition blog.

Heading South

But not for the warmth..

Tomorrow I’m taking the first stage of the journey to Antarctica, ironically enough though, I’m heading south by first heading north, to Oslo, where the Norwegian Polar Institute have organised an almost direct flight from Oslo to Troll station with a short stopover in Cape Town.

Bags almost packed and ready to go…

I’m super excited and also suffering a little trepidation. It will be my first field visit to Antarctica, even though I’ve worked in Greenland for many years, the differences will, I imagine be pretty huge…

Drygalski Mountains, Dronning Maud Land 29th December 2024, from Sentinel 2 processed by Copernicus.

We also have a very ambitious work plan with pretty novel and experimental equipment. It’s going to be interesting to see how much of what we have planned actually works. Small points of failure can destroy a field season. Though in our case, I’m pretty confident we’ll bring something back, even if it is not as much as I hope. And I’m always a little over-ambitious, but surprisingly often it pays off.

The opportunity to participate in iQ2300 first came up almost 3 years ago, so it’s been on the cards for a while and fieldwork has been on my mind all year. It will be nice to finally get going, even if I don’t necessarily feel ready in spite of the long run-up.

I never really feel ready for fieldwork, but at some point you just have to get on with it, like the penguins nervously clustering on the edge of the iceberg, wondering if there is a leopard seal in the water. Eventually someone jumps (or is pushed), and then they all go in and usually, the water is lovely. Although in our case, I doubt I will even get to see any penguins, the Wasa station, my home for the next 6 weeks or so is rather a long way for the sea. In the meantime the first groups are already out, opening the station ready for our arrival next week, deploying weather stations, running ice penetrating radar and checking out the equipment we’ll need to use. The signal groups we have are no longer just coordination but field updates direct from Antarctica – a miracle of telecommunications that we don’t even think about anymore!

The Autumn has also been far too hectic with my eternal inability to say no to interesting opportunities challenging everyone around me and especially myself. Will I ever learn? I remain extremely grateful for the team at DMI and at home for keeping things ticking over.

However, it has also felt like a sequence of tasks to tick off while the grand départ gets closer, annual meeting, tick, Hackathon, tick, panel meeting, tick and then eventually, annual report, tick, expense claims, tick, Christmas presents, yep, and finally tomorrow may actually come. Hence though, the notable lack of updates on here, I have had to find some slack somewhere on these informal little pieces that I’m unsure anyone reads have definitely been a casualty.

I’m not sure much is going to change the next couple of months either. But I will try to post at least occasionally, work schedule, weather and internet access permitting.

But first it’s time for a little Christmas hygge with my incredible family and my lovely husband who have never asked me not to go..

Danish æbleskiver and gløgg by candle light, perfect for a dark December evening, bring on the 24 hour daylight…

As ever I’m grateful to the Swedish Polar Secretariat for giving me and the team the opportunity to participate in this field season, as well as the Novo Nordisk Fund whose PRECISE challenge grant has also helped us to pay some of the other costs.

Freshwater Writing

It’s always nice to kick off a week with notification that a paper you have co-authored has been published.

In this case, and due to a magnificent effort by lead author Gavin Schmidt (who heaven knows must have many other things on his plate at NASA GISS right now), the” Datasets and protocols for including anomalous freshwater from melting ice sheets in climate simulations ” is now out in Geoscientific Model Development.

If that sounds a bit clunky, well it is. The idea is that the paper is a technical guidance, to help climate models (specifically for CMIP7), to include the effects of ice sheets into the earth system, without having to actually include a full ice sheet model, which turns out to be quite hard, particularly in Antarctica.

Even so there’s a lot of general interest in the paper, including how this is usually done now (there are a range of different approaches, each with their quirks). And then a particularly nice and clear section is given on all the many different ways that ice sheets lose ice. The figure below from the paper  shows some of these and as they all have different downstream effects on ocean circulation, sea ice and of course sea level rise, it’s important to work out how to include them efficiently. The paper as it stands is a really nice introduction to the subject.

Figure 1 from Schmidt et al., 2025 showing a schematic of how ice sheets lose ice.

Icebergs are particularly interesting as a source, as the meltwater from these can take years to be added to the ocean, in which time, they will have drifted hundreds or thousands of kilometres. We have some suggestions on those too.

In any case, we hope this paper, which grew out of a technical online workshop on the subject, partly organised by our Ocean Ice project, will turn out to be a useful source for the groups that actually run the global climate models for CMIP and the IPCC. Many of these models are still in development or being initialised now, so time is already short for those of us involved in the technical parts of the exercise. The publishing process is slow, but this is also why preprints are so valuable. This paper in its submitted form has been up for months, it’s only now the final version is ready, but it hasn’t changed much. While it feels hard enough keeping up with published papers that preprints feel like a distraction, science is moving so fast, it’s probably essential. Maybe I’ll write more about that later. Of course preprints (and indeed published papers) can lead you astray, especially in fields you don’t know much about (as COVID was a helpful reminder), so perhaps sensibly the IPCC insists on acceptance of manuscripts before including them in their reports. Nonetheless, keeping up with preprints is now probably almost as important for scientists as keeping up with the published literature.

On the subject of the IPCC, I was reminded this weekend that it’s now less than 500 days until the submission deadline for the working group 1 part of the next IPCC report (AR7), so it’s time to start thinking about what are the priorities to get into the scientific literature to inform this effort. IPCC can only report published work, and doesn’t do its own, so now is the moment to pull out that unfinished but crucial piece of evidence of something or other relevant and get it submitted.

Not coincidentally, it’s time to talk about Academic Writing Month (AcWriMo). I actually try to write all through the year but November is time for a final push to try and meet my (usually far too ambitious) annual goals.

I had intended to start AcWriMo again this year, I’ve  a huge backlog of papers to get done and it seemed a good way to start. However, a big proposal writing effort (more on here if the funding comes through) and a Hackathon (of which more also anon), both extremely rewarding and in fact also involving a lot of writing, somewhat derailed the first 10 days of my effort… 

Now however it is time to focus on the remaining almost 3 weeks of November. The plan is one hour per day, except weekends, just focused on papers. I’ve put it in my calendar already. Let’s see if I can stretch more than that. Also non- negotiable is daily exercise. The fresh air and time away from the computer is almost as important as sitting down to do the work.

I’ve got an almost done experimental protocol to write for the PolarRES project (which finishes his month, so there’d be a nice symmetry to getting that done). And then there’s the much delayed reply to reviewers on our ice mélange study in NW Greenland as my main foci, but I also want to help my Hackathon group get their project knocked into shape, so some time will be spent there.

I’ve also got various diverse co-authored papers I need to contribute to, read,edit and give my options on. I hate to become a roadblock for colleagues so that also needs some attention but I’m for sure already out of time.

So if you want to see all stages of the sausage being made, follow along with the hashtag (#AcWriMo25) on socials, but hopefully you won’t see me there much because I .

Meeting LISA

LISA: the Lightweight In Situ Analysis box is one of a kind; built by our friends at PICE in the Niels Bohr Institute. Later this year we’re taking LISA to Antarctica for the first time ever, to analyse shallow snow and firn cores directly in the field.

This is part of our contribution to the EPIC iQ2300 – a project led by Prof. Arjen Stroeven in Stockholm and organised by the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat.

iQ2300 is a huge project, and we are just a small part of it: the aim is to understand Dronning Maud Land’s evolution from the Holocene and out to 2300. Expect to hear a lot more about this effort in coming months…

Map of Antarctica, I lifted from polar.se : LISA will be visiting the Swedish Wasa station in DML – the top bit on this map – with us


Now back to our humble friend.

We hope LISA will help us understand how much snow falls in Dronning Maud Land, how much it varies from year to year and what is the influence of sea ice and far field atmospheric processes on the rate of snowfall. Snowfall is exceptionally difficult to measure and one of our biggest uncertainties in working out Antarctic mass budget and the response of Antarctica to a changing climate (spoiler alert: we might have a paper coming out about this shortly)…

Meet LISA: a view inside the Magic Box..


Although LISA has been used in Greenland before, this is quite an experimental deployment, which means potentially really a lot of valuable scientific results. We would ultimately liek to build an Antarctic specific box, but that will have to wait to see if the results of this deployment are as good as we hope. (And some funding – if you are a billionaire with a spare couple of hundred thousand Euros, we’re always interested in talking).

The box itself is conceptually simple but in practice a little complex with a multiplicity of tubes, connectors and spare parts. This means it’s easy to fix if it breaks down, but also we need to understand how it works first.

Some parts of LISA are quite fiddly…


Today, the awesome and exceptionally generous Associate Professor Helle Kjær took myself, Stockholm Uni Prof Ninis Rosqvist and our PhD colleague from the Novo Nordisk funded PRECISE project, Clément Cherblanc through the use of the box.

Helle showing Clément the workings inside LISA

There’s a lot to remember and a lot to check but we’re reasonably hopeful we’ll get good results. The aim is to understand both the interannual variability on decadal timescales and the spatial gradients in snowfall accumulation. It’s a huge task, so it’s probably fortunate that we have 6 weeks or so (depending on the weather always!) to try and get it deployed at anumber of different sites which will hopefully allow us to do this.

It’s a big change to my normal fieldwork activities, but also a logical extension of them. And highly complementary to the climate and SMB modelling we are developing.

Nonetheless, ithere’s a lot of new stuff and I have in the past weeks learnt a great deal about transporting very small amounts of mildly hazardous chemicals on airlines, how to deal with customs and pack fragile instruments in large boxes.

Much more to come on this project, so stay tuned…

Clement getting stuck into using the software that measures different properties in the cores.

PROTECT: The Sea Level Rise Question

There is currently some discussion in the Danish media about sea level rise hazards and the risk of rapid changes that may or may not be on the horizon. Some of the discussion is about IPCC estimates. That’s a little unfortunate and in fact a bit unfair as the IPCC report has not been updated since 2021, nor was it intended to have been. In the mean time there has been a lot of additional science to clear up some of the ambiguities and questions left from the last report.

I’ve been working quite a bit on the cryosphere part of the sea level question of late, so thought I’d share some insights from the latest research into the debate at this point. And I have a pretty specific viewpoint here, because I’ve been working with the datasets, models, climate outputs etc that will likely go into the next IPCC report as part of a couple of EU funded projects. As part of that, we have prepared a policy briefing that will be presented to the European Parliament in June this year, but it’s already online now and will no doubt cross your socials later this week. I’m going to put in some highlights into this post too.

Now, I want to be really clear that everything I say in this post can be backed up with peer reviewed science, most of which has been published in the last 2 to 3 years. Let’s start with the summary:.:

  • The sea is rising. And the rate of rise is currently accelerating.
  • The sea will continue to rise long into the future. The rate of that sea level rise is largely in our society’s hands, given that it is strongly related to greenhouse gas emissions.
  • We have already committed to at least 2m of sea level rise by 2300.
  • By the end of 2100 most small glaciers and ice caps will be gone, mountain glaciers will contribute 20-24% of total sea-level rise under varying emission scenarios.
  • Antarctic and Greenland ice sheet mass loss will contribute significantly to sea-level rise for centuries, even under low emissions scenarios
  • Abrupt sea level rise on the order of metres in a few decades is not credible given new understanding of key ice fracture and iceberg calving processes.
  • By the end of this century we expect on the order of a half to one metre of sea level rise around Denmark, depending on emissions pathway. (If you want to get really specific: the low-likelihood high impact sea level rise scenario corresponds to about 0.9 m (on average), or at the 83rd percentile, about 1.6 m of sea level rise).
  • Your local sea level rise is not the same as the global average and some areas, primarily those at lower latitudes will experience higher total sea level rise and earlier than in regions at higher latitudes.
  • We have created a local sea level rise tool. You should still check your local coastal services provider, they will certainly have something tailor made for your local coastline (or they *should*!), but for something more updated than the IPCC, with latest SLR data, this is the one to check.

Sea level rise now is ~5mm per year averaged over the last 5 years, 10 years ago it was about 3 mm per year). Much of that sea level rise comes from melting ice, particularly the small glaciers and ice caps that are melting very fast indeed right now. Even under lower levels of emissions, those losses will increase. There won’t be many left by the end of this century.

Greenland is the largest single contributor and adds just less than a millimetre of sea level rise per year, with Antarctica contributing around a third of Greenland, primarily from the Amundsen Sea sector. The remaining sea level rise comes from thermal expansion of the oceans. Our work shows very clearly that the emissions pathway we follow as a human society will determine the ultimate sea level rise, but also how fast that will be achieved. The less we burn, the lower and slower the rise. But even under a low-end Paris scenario, we expect around 1 metre of sea level by 2300.

The long tail of sea level rise will come from Antarctica, where the ocean is accelerating melt of, in particular, West Antarctica. However, our recent work and that of other ice sheet groups shows that the risk of multi-metre sea level rise within a few decades is unrealistic. Again, to be very clear: We can’t rule out multiple metres of sea level rise, but it will happen on a timescale of centuries rather than years. High emissions pathways make multiple metres of sea level rise more likely. In fact, our results show that even under low emissions pathways, we may still be committed to losing some parts of especially West Antarctica, but it will still take a long-time for the Antarctic ice sheet to disintegrate. We have time to prepare our coastlines.

Greenland is losing ice much faster than Antarctica, and here atmospheric processes and firn and snow are more important than the ocean and these are also where the læarge uncertainties are. As I’ve written about before, that protective layer of compressed snow and ice will determine how quickly Greenland melts, as it is lost, the ice sheet will accelerate it’s contribution to sea level. This is a process that is included in our estimates.

There’s so much more I could write, but that’s supposed to be the high level summary. Feel free to shoot me questions in the comment feeds. I’ll do my best to answer them.

Five years ago, a small group of European scientists got together to do something really ambitious: work out how quickly and how far the sea will rise, both locally and on average worldwide, from the melting of glaciers and ice sheets. The PROTECT project was the first EU funded project in 10 years to really grapple with the state-of-the-art in ice sheet and glacier melt and the implications for sea level rise and to really seek to understand what is the problem, what are the uncertainties, what can we do about it.

We were and are a group of climate scientists, glaciologists, remote sensors, ice sheet modellers, atmospheric and ocean physicists, professors, statisticians, students, coastal adaptation specialists, social scientists and geodesists, stakeholders and policymakers. We’ve produced more than 155 scientific papers in the last 5 years (with more on the way) and now our findings are summarised in our new policy briefing for the European Parliament.

It’s been a formative, exhilarating and occasionally tough experience doing big science in the Horizon 2020 framework, but we’ve genuinely made some big steps forward, including new estimates of rates of ice sheet and glacier loss, a better understanding of some key processes, particularly calving and the influence of the ocean on the loss of ice shelves. More importantly for human societies, by integrating the social scientists into the project, we have had a very clear focus on how to consider sea level rise, not just as a scientific ice sheet process problem, but also how to integrate the findings into usable and workable information. In Denmark, we will start to use these inputs already in updating the Danish Climate Atlas. If you are elsewhere in the world, you may want to check out our sea level rise tool, that shows how the emissions pathway we follow, will affect your local sea level rise.

Our final recommendations?

  1. Accelerate emission reductions to follow the lower emission scenario to limit
    cryosphere loss and associated sea-level rise
  2. Enhance monitoring of glaciers and ice sheets to refine models and predictions
  3. Support the long-term development of ice sheet models, their integration into
    climate models, and the coupling of glacier models with hydrological models, while
    promoting education and training to build expertise in these areas
  4. Invest in flexible and localized coastal management that incorporates
    uncertainty and long-term projections
  5. Foster international collaboration to share knowledge, resources, and strategies
    for mitigating and adapting to global impacts

Looking backwards…

This is the first in a two-parter. At this time of year, posts making bold statements about what happened last year and what we plan to do this year start to become prominent. The last few years I have spent a few hours in the first week of January reviewing what worked, what was fun and what was cool, what was awful and what definitely was a waste of time. I’m not honestly sure that any of this is of interest to anyone except me, so read on, but you have been warned..

2024: Themes of this year: Greenland, Machine Learning, people, and big data…

I visited the world’s largest island 3 times this year – a rather unprecedented number of times for me, with fieldwork in April (it was very cold and there was a lot of snow) to continue a soon to be submitted for publication set of observations in the melange zone and then to establish a new snow observation site.

View from Qaanaaq at evening in early April 2024.

In late May and early June, after a slightly longer than expected stop in Ilulissat, we made it to bring in the instruments before the sea ice break-up and happily my new snow observations seem to be working. Now I just need to do set-up the data processing chain, which will be 2025’s paying myself first.

Working with scientists from the Greenland natural resources institute and local hunters on the sea ice.

The final trip was in October for a workshop with scientists in Greenland about climate change impacts in Greenland, the subpolar gyre and AMOC for the UN Ocean decade. It was a memorable meeting for the sheer range and quality of science presented as well as for being stranded in Nuuk by a broken aeroplane in quite ridiculously beautiful weather (I mostly stayed in my hotel room to write the aforementioned paper, sadly. In 2025 I will work on my priorities) .

Apart from fieldwork I have really tried hard on publications this year. I have (like many scientists I suspect), far more data sitting around on hard drives than I have published. It’s a waste and it’s also fun to work on actual data instead of endless emails. This is something I intend to continue focusing on the next few years as well. There is gold in them thar computers…

We had a couple of writing retreats were very successful. These I plan to continue also and the PRECISE project grant is happily flexible enough to do this. I probably achieve as much in terms of data processing and paper writing in 3 focused days as I would in 3 months in the office. It paid off too. I managed to co-author 8 papers published this year (including my first 1st-author paper in ages – a workshop report, but nevertheless it counts.). Some of these are still preprints, so will change, and there are a couple more that have been submitted but are not yet available as preprints. I will submit two more papers in the next 3 weeks as well (1 first author), so January 2025 is going to be the 13th month of 2024 in my mind.

Bootcamps have been a theme the last 3 years, I organised the first in 2022 and so far there have been 4 publications from that first effort. There was another this year in June, ( I have attended them in 2023 and 2024 but was not organising) where we really got going on a project for ESA that I have had my eye on for a while – I hope the publication from that will be ready in the Spring this coming year.

Machine Learning: This was the year I really got machine learning. I’ve been following a graduate course online, and learning from my colleagues and students about implementations. I understand a lot more about the architecture and how to in practice apply neural networks and other techniques like random forests now. This is not before time, as we intend to implement these to contribute to CMIP7 and the next IPCC report. We still have a lot of work to do, but the foundation is laid. And it’s been fun to learn something that, if not exactly new, is a new application of something. In fact the biggest barrier has really been learning new terminology. We have also been fortunate that Eumetsat and the ECMWF have been very helpful in providing us with ML-optimised computer resources to test much of these new models out on. We’re actually running out of resources a bit though, so it’s time to start investigating Lumi, Leonardo and the new Danish centre Gefion to see what we can get out of these.

People: This year our research group has grown with another 2 PhD students, and at the end of the year we also employed a new post-doc. I think it’s large enough now. I’m very aware that if I don’t do my job properly, then not only the research but the people will suffer, so developing people management skills is really important. In any case it’s extremely stimulating to work with such talented young people and I’m really excited to see where the science will take us, given the skills in the team. I hope I have been good enough at managing such a large and young team, but I have my doubts. A focus for 2025 for sure.

Data: This has been the year of big data, not necessarily just for ML purposes but also in the PolarRES project the production and management of an enormous set of future climate projections at very high resolution. More on this anon. Suffice to say, it has taken a lot of my time and mental energy and it’s probably not the most exciting thing to talk about, but we now have 800 Tb of climate simulation data to dig into. I suspect that rewards of this will be coming for years. There has also been a lot of digging into satellite datasets and the bringing together of the two has been very rewarding already. It’s a rich seam, to continue the metaphor, that will be producing scientific gold for many years.

Projects: we have gone in the final year of two projects, PROTECT and PolarRES, both of which will finally end in 2025. We also arrived at the half way point of OCEAN:ICE. So rather than being a year of starts, it has been a year where we have started to prepare for endings – actually this is a fun part of many projects where a lot of the grunt work is out the way and we can start to see what we have actually found out. It can also be a slog of confusing data, writing and editing papers and dealing with h co-author comments. I’ve definitely been in that process this year, hopefully with some of the outputs to come next year…

Proposals: I started 2024 writing a proposal. Colleagues were in 3 different consortia for the same call, alas ours didn’t get funded, but 2 of the others did and will start this year. That is a good result for DMI and our group. I wrote another proposal in the Autumn and contributed to a 4th and finally at the end of the year I heard that both will *likely* be funded (but are currently embargoed and in negotiation, so no more will be said now). It sometimes feels that spending so much time and energy on proposal writing is putting the cart before the horse, but in fact I find proposal writing something akin to brainstorming. It’s essential of course to ensure we can continue to do the science we want, but it can also help us to clarify our ideas and make sure we’re not on the wrong track. It’s also a good way to keep track of what the funders are actually wanting to know and to help us focus on policy relevance.

There was also an incredible number of meetings, reports, milestones and deliverables, but you probably don’t want to hear about that…

Also missing from this summary is personal life, and, well that is not for sharing publically, but suffice to say, I learnt about raising teenagers, I also had some very good times with friends and family, to all of whom I immensely grateful for being a part of my voyages around the sun.

Anyway, reading all that back, I’m not surprised I ended the year exhausted! I am not planning on quite such a slog in future. I should probably pace myself a bit more this year, the plans for which will be the subject of next week’s post.

Local sea level rise: A question of gravity

I’ve explained several times in the course of media comments that, when it comes to the sea level rise that you experience, it really matters where the water comes from. This point still seems to cause confusion so I’ve written a super fast post on it.

Waves from the Storm Surge that hit Denmark in October 2023 credit: Sebastian Pelt

We very often talk about a metre or two of sea level rise by the end of the century, but in general that refers to global average sea level. And much like a global mean temperature rise doesn’t tell you very much about the kind of temperature changes you will experience in your location due to weather or climate, global mean sea level is also not very informative when talking about preparing your local community for sea level rise. There are other local factors that are important, (see below), but here I’m going to mostly focus on gravity.

Imagine that sea level is more or less stable around the earth (which it was, more or less, before the start of the twentieth century). Just like the moon causes tides because its gravity exerts a pull on the oceans, the ice sheets are large masses and their gravity also attracts ocean water, so the average sea level is higher closer to Greenland and to Antarctica. But there is only a finite volume of water in the oceans, so a higher sea level close to the ice sheets means lower sea levels further away in the tropics for example.

As the ice sheet melts and gets smaller, its gravitational pull becomes smaller so the average height of the sea around Greenland and Antarctica is lower than it was before, but the water gets redistributed around the earth until it is in equilibrium with the gravitational pull of the ice sheets again. The sea level in other places is therefore much higher than it would have been without that gravitational effect.

And in general, the further away from an ice mass you are, the more these gravitational processes affect your local sea level change. In Northern Europe, it often surprises people (also here in Denmark) to learn that while Greenland has a small influence on our local sea level, it’s not very much because we live relatively close to it, however the loss of ice from Antarctica is much more important in affecting our local sea level rise.

Currently, most of the ice contributing to sea level is from the small glaciers around the world, and here too there is an effect. The melt of Alaska and the Andes are more important to our sea level than the Alps or Norwegian glaciers because we are far from the American glaciers but close to the European ones.

This figure below illustrates the processes:

Processes important for local sea level include changes in land height as ice melts but also the redistribution of water as the gravitational attraction of the ice sheets is reduced. The schematic representation is from the Arctic assessment SWIPA report Figure 9.1 from SWIPA 2017

This is partly why the EU funded PROTECT project on cryosphere contributions to sea level rise, which I am currently working on, has an emphasis on the science to policymakers pipeline. We describe the whole project in this Frontiers paper, which includes a graphic explaining what affects your local sea level.

As you can see, it very much depends on what time and spatial scale you’re looking at, with the two ice sheets affecting sea level on the longest time scales.

Figure 1 from Durand et al., 2021 Illustration of the processes that contribute to sea level change with respect to their temporal and spatial scales. These cover local and short term effects like storm surges, waves and tides to global and long-term changes due to the melting of ice sheets.

In the course of the project some of the partners have produced this excellent policy briefing, which should really be compulsory for anyone interested in coastal developments over the next decades to centuries. The most important points are worth highlighting here:

We expect that 2m of global mean sea level rise is more or less baked in, it will be very difficult to avoid this, even with dramatic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. But the timescale, as in when that figure will be reached, could be anything from the next hundred years to the next thousand.

Figure from PROTECT policy briefing showing how the time when average global sea level reaches 2m is strongly dependend on emissions pathway – but also that different parts of the world will reach 2m of sea level rise at very different times, with the tropics and low latitudes in general getting there first.

What the map shows is that the timing at which any individual place on earth reaches 2 m is strongly dependent on where on earth it is. In general lower latitudes close to the equator will get to 2m before higher latitudes, and while there are ocean circulation and other processes that are important here – to a large extent your local sea level is controlled by how close to the ice sheets you are and how quickly those ice sheets will lose their ice.

There are other processes that are important – especially locally, including how much the land you are on is rising or sinking, as well as changes in ocean and atmosphere circulation. I may write about these a bit more later.

Feel free to comment or ask questions in the comments below or you can catch me on mastodon:

Building the Next Generation…

Hands-up who is looking for a new and very cool job in ice sheet and climate modelling and developing new machine learning tools?

REMINDER: 4 days left to apply for this PhD position with me at DMI looking at Antarctic Ice Sheet mass budget processes and developing new Machine Learning models and processes.

UPDATE 2: The PhD position on Antarctica is now live here. Deadline for Applications 18th February!

UPDATE: It’s not technically a PRECISE job, but if you’re a student in Copenhagen and are looking for a part-time study job (Note that this is a specific limited hours job-type for students in higher education in Dnmark) , DMI have got 2 positions open right now, at least one of which will be dedicated to very related work – namely working out how well climate and ice sheet models work when compared with satellite data. It’s part of a European Space Agency funded project that I and my ace colleague Shuting Yang, PI on the new TipESM project, are running. Apply. Apply. Apply…

I’ve written about the PRECISE project before, our new Novo Nordisk funded project looking at ice sheets and sea level rise.

This is a quick post to announce that our recruitment drive is now open. We’re split across three institutes. We are two in Copenhagen, ourselves at DMI and the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen, and then the University of Northumbria in Newcastle, UK.

The PI at the Niels Bohr Institute is the supremely talented Professor Christine Hvidberg, aided by material scientist and head of the institute, Joachim Mathiesen. I am leading for DMI, and the Northumbria work is led by Professor Hilmar Gudmundsson. We are also very fortunate to have the talents of Aslak Grindsted, Helle Schmidt, Nicolas Rathmann and Nicolaj Hansen already on board.

The project is already very cohesive between institutes, we’ve been working together for some time already and know each other well.

We have a good budget for travel and exchanges between groups, workshops, symposia, summer schools and the like, but perhaps more importantly, all the positions are focused at the very cutting edge (apologies for the cliche) of climate and ice sheet modelling. We are developing not just existing models and new ways to parameterise physical processes, but we also want to focus on machine learning to incorporate new processes, speed-up the production of projections for sea level rise, not forgetting an active interface with the primary stakeholders who will need to use the outcomes of the project to prepare society for the coming changes.

There’s also a healthy fieldwork component (particularly in Greenland, I don’t rule out Antarctica either), and if you’re that way inclined, some ice core isotope work too. So, if you’re looking for a new direction, feel free to give me a shout. I’m happy to talk further.

Links to all the openings, will be updated as they come out, these are currently open and have deadlines at the end of January:

Newcastle: A three-year postdoctoral research position in machine learning emulators of ice-ocean processes

Newcastle: A two-year postdoctoral researcher (PDRA) position in subglacial modeling of the Antarctic Ice Sheet

Copenhagen (NBI) PhD Project in Greenland ice sheet climate and precipitation variability

Copenhagen (DMI) PhD Project in Antarctic ice sheet surface mass budget (also keep an eye here, where there are also some other interesting jobs announced)

photo showing a small white tent on a snow covered sea ice surface with people dressed in thick warm clothes dropping instruments through a whole in the ice. The sky is a clear blue fading to vioet and pink at sunset
Field camp on sea ice, northern Greenland 2023, measure ocean influences on calving outlet glacier.
(Photo credit: Ruth Mottram, DMI)

A cryosphere call to action..

The International Cryosphere Climate Initiative has put together a new petition for scientists to sign. I’m a little sceptical that this kind of “clicktivism” makes much difference, but there are many many lobbyists from polluting industries at the COP28 and rather fewer scientists. And how else to draw attention to what is one of the most visible and urgent effects of climate change?

The petition is aimed at:

” all cryosphere scientists globally; as well as those working on emissions pathways: and those in the social sciences with research on adaptation, loss and damage and health impacts. This includes research and field associates, as well as doctoral students — because you are the future, and will be dealing with the impacts of climate change in the global cryosphere throughout your lives, as well as your professional careers.”

ICCI

The list of signatories so far already includes many rather senior scientists, so take this as a challenge to add your signature if you work in the cryosphere/climate space. It takes only a minute to sign and there are many familiar names on the list.

I’m not sure how else to emphasise the urgency of real action at COP 28.

Small bergy bits in the bay near Ilulissat, with Lego Ice Man for scale (and an important message)

As a coincidence though, and as I posted on mastodon the image below appears in Momentum, a plug-in on my web browser with a new photo every day. Today’s is this beautiful image of the Marmolada glacier in Italy by Vicentiu Solomon.

Marmolada Glacier by Vicentiu Solomon

It’s a gorgeous but very sad picture – this is one of the faster disappearing #glaciers in the world and to hear more about the consequences of cryosphere loss, take a look at the policy brief produced by the PROTECT project on the sea level rise contributions from glaciers and ice sheets. It also contains this eye opening graphic:

A 2 metre rise in sea level is almost inevitable. The uncertainty is on the timing which is somewhere between one century and the next 2 thousand years, depending on where you are in the world, but, more importantly given COP28, how fast fossil fuels are phased out. You can download the whole thing here.

So there you have it. Here’s a reminder of the petition from the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative.