Events

Speaker: Sophie Coulson, Assistant Professor, Department of Earth Sciences, University of New Hampshire

Host: David Mohrig

Title: Predicting and Observing Geophysical Patterns of Sea Level Change

Abstract: Rapid melting of ice sheets and glaciers drives a unique geometry, or fingerprint, of sea level change. As an ice sheet loses mass, its gravitational attraction on the nearby ocean is reduced, causing ocean water to migrate away from the ice sheet. Additionally, the solid Earth rebounds in response to the reduction in surface loading. This combination of geophysical processes leads to a sea level fall within ~2000 km of the melting ice sheet and a progressive sea level rise outside of this region. In this talk I will discuss numerical models developed to predict these patterns of sea level change and recent implications for, and conclusion drawn from, observational datasets. Specifically, I’ll explore the fingerprint of sea level change due to ice mass loss from the Greenland Ice Sheet and Arctic glaciers over the last three decades and its effect on sea surface height measurements, GPS data and earthquake hazard.