Mass balance of the Antarctic ice sheet from 1992 to 2017

Posted on 13/06/2018 by Bethan Davies

A new paper with a whole host of authors has just been published in Nature (IMBIE Team, 2018). It provides a new estimate of mass balance of the entire Antarctic Ice Sheet over the last 25 years, the longest and most thorough estimate of this to date.

This article argues that the Antarctic Peninsula, the smallest ice sheet in Antarctica, has lost an average of 20 Gigatonnes (Gt) of ice per year over the 25 year study. This increased during the study and especially since the year 2000. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet lost 53±29 Gt yr^-1 from 1992-1997, but this accelerated to 159±26 Gt yr^-1 from 2012-2017. The East Antarctic Ice Sheet is more stable, with small gains (with large errors) over the study period. Continue reading →

Thinking Teaching

Posted on 11/10/2017 by Bethan Davies

Having now been lecturing for a few years, I’ve had the opportunity and time to think about what kind of lecturer I want to be. I wrote this down a while ago but decided to share it now – because thinking about and sharing best practice makes us all better teachers, and because ECRs just starting to think about teaching might find it useful.

Continue reading →

Combining Academia and Motherhood

Posted on 04/08/2017 by Bethan Davies

There is often a lot of doom and gloom in Academia. People discuss the workload, the work-life balance, and the difficulty in taking maternity leave or having a family. For example, this recent piece in The Guardian highlights one professor’s less-than-positive experience of having children as an academic. The Times Higher Ed writes about the leaky pipeline, often attributed to the difficulty in balancing motherhood and an academic career.

However, I believe that, while there are often difficulties, I think there are also reasons to be positive in Academia. In my opinion, in terms of family life, Academia is no worse than, and in many places better than, most other professional careers. There are advantages and disadvantages in an academic career when it comes to family life, but in many ways they are similar to the challenges faced by many professional women across a spectrum of careers. Many of these are societal, rather than academic, issues. I would hate a young, promising academic to be put off just because they only perceive the negative aspects. Continue reading →

The Larsen C Ice Shelf growing rift

Posted on 19/06/2017 by Bethan Davies

Antarctic Peninsula ice shelves

The Antarctic Peninsula is fringed by floating ice shelves. They are floating extensions of the glaciers on land, and receive mass by snowfall and marine freeze-on. They lose mass by melting at their base and by calving icebergs. Larsen C Ice Shelf, the largest ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula, is currently being closely watched. Following a series of high-profile ice-shelf collapse events on the Antarctic Peninsula over the last few decades, all eyes are watching Larsen C and wondering when, and if, it will collapse.

A growing rift on Larsen C Ice Shelf

Those concerns are growing more acute as a large rift on Larsen C Ice Shelf is growing rapidly, threatening to soon calve a huge iceberg, equivalent to losing 10% of the area of the ice shelf. This could destabilise the ice shelf, making it more susceptible to a total collapse.

Larsen C rift animation uses #Sentinel1 InSAR to illustrate recent jumps in rift progression. From Prof. Adrian Luckman.

Continue reading →

The Global Last Glacial Maximum

Posted on 15/06/2017 by Bethan Davies

Around 27,000 years ago, ice sheets reached their maximum across the world, after a period of global cooling caused by variations in the Earth’s orbit around the sun. There was a massive ice sheet in North America (the Laurentide Ice Sheet)^{[1, 2]}, a large Eurasian Ice Sheet covering Britain, Ireland and Scandinavia as well as northern Europe^[3], an ice sheet in Antarctica^[4], the Himalaya and Patagonia^{[5, 6]}. Land near the ice sheets that escaped glaciation was cold, with tundra vegetation. Northern Europe was frequented by ice-age animals such as mammoth, reindeer and arctic hare. There was a landbridge betweeb Britain and Europe, and animals could walk freely across it. Numerous human artefacts from this time are scattered across the landscape.

Ice sheets at the Last Glacial Maximum worldwide, around 27,000 to 21,000 years ago. From data in Ehlers et al., 2011.

Continue reading →

Antarctic Sea Ice

Posted on 19/04/2017 by Bethan Davies

Guest post by Dr Jonathan Day, Department of Meteorology, University of Reading

What is going on with the Antarctic sea ice?

March 2017 was an interesting month for sea ice. Both northern and southern hemispheres experienced record breaking low extents for the time of year. The extent of Arctic sea ice reached the maximum area of its seasonal cycle on March 7^th coming in at 14.42 million km². This was a fraction below the previous record, set in 2015 and is in line with what we expect to see in a warming climate. Meanwhile the other side of the planet Antarctic sea ice continues to confound expectations. Continue reading →

Will we enter another ice age?

Posted on 28/01/2016 by Bethan Davies

There are a number of web and news articles around surrounding the question of whether or not we will enter another ice age. Many of these questions arise from the idea that a collapse or significant melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet will produce enough fresh water to shut down the global thermohaline circulation, dropping us into a new ice age in the next 10,000 years.

Continue reading →

The Pregnant Field Scientist

Posted on 24/01/2016 by Bethan Davies

Last autumn, I had two great pieces of news. The first was that I had been awarded a small grant to conduct three weeks’ fieldwork in Chile. The second was that I was pregnant.

I was obviously immediately interested in other people’s stories about fieldwork while pregnant. I could find only a few blogs about it on the internet, so I thought I would write about my own experiences of fieldwork while pregnant.

Continue reading →

Software Sustainability Fellowship

Posted on 05/12/2014 by Bethan Davies

I’m delighted to have been awarded a £3000 Software Sustainability Fellowship by the Software Sustainability Institute. This promises to be a great collaboration and I’m excited to be working with the SSI to promote sustainable software practices.

I plan to use the Fellowship funds to host a Software Carpentry Workshop at RHUL, and to attend a conference where I’ll promote sustainable software practices, including promoting open code.

For more information, please see the Fellowship Programme over at the SSI. You can read the profiles of the current and former Fellows here.

Where are the top geological sites in the UK?

Posted on 03/11/2014 by Bethan Davies

As part of Earth Week 2014, the Geological Society ran a competition to find the UK’s top 100 Geosites. The competition can be followed on Twitter with the #100Geosites hashtag.

The results were published as an online clickable map and the results were highlighted on the BBC. This map is ideal for choosing your next UK holiday destination!

Not to be outdone, the Quaternary Research Association has highlighted, as part of its 50th Anniversary celebrations, the UK’s top 50 Quaternary sites. Again, this is presented as an online clickable map. Continue reading →