This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
The International Research Fellowship Program enables U.S. scientists and engineers to conduct nine to twenty-four months of research abroad. The program's awards provide opportunities for joint research, and the use of unique or complementary facilities, expertise and experimental conditions abroad.
This award will support a twenty-four-month research fellowship by Dr. Michelle R. Koutnik to work with Dr. Dorthe Dahl-Jensen at the University of Copenhagen?s Centre for Ice and Climate Studies in Denmark.
The spatial and temporal histories of ice-sheet flow and accumulation are necessary to recreate past ice-volume and sea-level histories, and to predict the response of ice sheets to future climate changes. Some details of these valuable histories can be recovered from ice cores, but ice cores represent conditions at only a single point. Since it is resource intensive to recover a deep ice core, it is impractical to reconstruct the important spatial dimension from ice cores alone. A solution is to use available ice-penetrating radar data to infer this information. Ice-penetrating-radar profiles are windows to the interior of glaciers and ice sheets. These views inside the ice show internal layers that have been shaped by spatial and temporal changes in ice flow, in ice thickness, and in accumulation. The deepest visible layers have been significantly affected by spatial and temporal gradients in ice flow and accumulation. Therefore, deep layers are highly valuable, but they are also more complicated to interpret. The PI uses an inverse-theory approach to properly extract this valuable information. Radar-imaged internal layers may be the only accessible surviving archive that contains a record of past spatial and temporal variations in ice flow and accumulation over broad areas of the ice sheets and ice caps, and reaching far into the past. In collaboration with host scientist, Dr. Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, and the team of researchers at the Center for Ice and Climate Studies at the University of Copenhagen, the PI is addressing important questions about the relationship between climate changes and ice-sheet evolution for parts of the Greenland Ice Sheet and Arctic Ice Caps.
