ICE: Interactions between Climate and Earth surface processes

Read the full interview here

Congratulations to Vjeran! Here is the link.

With the conclusion of the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM), about 20 000 years ago, ended the most recent long-lasting cold phase in Earth history. This last glacial advance left a strong observable imprint on the landscape, such as moraines, trimlines and other glacial geomorphic features. These features reflect the extent of former glaciers and ice caps, which in turn provides information on past temperature and precipitation conditions. Here we present an inverse approach to reconstruct the equilibrium line altitudes (E) from observed ice extents. The ice-flow model is developed solving the mass conservation equation using the shallow ice approximation and implemented using Graphical Processing Units (GPUs). We present the theoretical basis of the inversion method, which relies on a Tikhonov regularization, and demonstrate its ability to constrain spatial variations in mass balance with idealized and real glaciers.

Here is a new publication by Jiao about the work he did on the Southern Alps of New Zealand. Jiao used on Raman Spectroscopy of Carbonaceous Material on sediments. The study shows how erosion patterns vary during a glacial retreat. Jiao’s new work extends nicely the work we published in the last few years using the same methodology (Herman et al., 2015; Nibourel et al., 2015; Beyssac et al., 2016).

Joanne, Benjamin, Günther and Luca alongside other colleagues at UNIL returned to the Gorner glacier for 3 days at the beginning of the month. The aim of the trip was to collect samples for calibration purposes from the surfaces exposed during last year’s trip.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-018-0236-z

On August, 28, Renske Lambert graduated for her PhD. Congratulations Renske!

We would like to warmly welcome Luca Malatesta who recently joined us.

This month the Earth Surface Process Modelling group from GFZ is visiting us.  We took this opportunity to do a 2-day field excursion at the Gorner glacier flowing down Monte Rosa.

Günther published a new study investigating the coupling between glacial erosion and tectonics: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2017JF004559

It builds up on previous work by Headley et al. (2012), and it now provides a theoretical framework for the glacial buzzsaw hypothesis.