Firn saturation as a tipping point for ice sheet melt
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Employer: Utrecht University |
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Job location: Utrecht Netherlands |
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Apply before: 30 Oct 2019 |
Summary
The goal is to find melting thresholds beyond which the firn layer becomes saturated, leading to accelerated mass loss.
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Project description: Firn, an up to 150 m thick layer of compressed snow, covers ~90% and >99% of the Greenland (GrIS) and Antarctic ice (AIS) sheets, respectively. It has been estimated that in the air pockets of the firn layer, ~45% (GrIS) and >99% (AIS) of the surface meltwater is retained and refrozen. This means that firn acts as an efficient buffer to ice sheet mass loss. However, when in a future warmer climate the melt rate increases, it is expected that at some point (a so-called tipping point), the firn layer can no longer sufficiently regenerate these air pockets in winter and becomes saturated, irreversibly losing its buffering capacity, leading to enhanced meltwater runoff, ice sheet mass loss and sea level rise. In this project we use regional climate models and firn models in combination with the latest output of global climate models from CMIP6, dynamically and statistically downscaled to high resolution over the ice sheets, to assess the current and future meltwater buffer capacity of the firn layers of the GrIS and AIS. The goal is to find melting thresholds beyond which the firn layer becomes saturated, leading to accelerated mass loss.
Supervisors: van den Broeke (UU-SCIENCE)
Host institute: UU-SCIENCE
Required background/expertise: Master’s degree in (geo)physics, meteorology, hydrology or comparable. Experienced in and/or affinity with programming and numerical model development.
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