WHY DOES MY RESEARCH MATTER?

 

Glaciers and ice sheets play an important role in the global environment. They are storage systems of most of the world's fresh water, they dramatically alter the landscape and sea level, affect ecosystems, and provide us with not only recent, but hundreds of thousands of years of direct records of climate and atmospheric conditions and of changes therein.

 

To date, the effect of tributary flow on glacier dynamics has been largely neglected in glaciological research. Knowledge of the processes related to the presence and nature of tributaries will hold tools for improved prediction of glacier recession rates, changes in glacier flow, our fresh water supplies, global sea level, our mountain landscapes, and glacier hazards such as those caused by ice-dammed lakes. Although my research focuses on relatively small mountain glaciers, the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets have tributary flow too, and predictions of potential instabilities in these massive bodies of ice can also be improved by an increased knowledge of the processes of tributary-trunk interaction.

 

WHY SHOULD PEOPLE KNOW ABOUT IT?

 

Glaciers are beautiful and intriguing, and are situated in one of the most pristine landscapes: the high mountains and the polar regions. Even if you cannot always go and see them yourselves, they are fascinating natural systems to learn about.

 

Global warming has caused widespread accelerated glacier retreat, which has negative effects on the fresh water available for humans and in ecosystems, and which has caused and still causes global sea level rise. In order to understand how glaciers fit into our world and how we fit into the glaciers’ world it is important to understand how glaciers work and what causes them to change. By being informed about natural systems such as glaciers we can not only understand why some changes in nature happen so fast while others take longer, but also what our influence on these systems can be. All systems in our world are connected, and a small change on one side of the globe can have a large effect in other parts or even on our entire world.