Geography researcher Dr Grace Nield has been awarded a prestigious Royal Society Fellowship to advance understanding of how ice loss contributes to global sea-level rise.
Grace was selected for a University Research Fellowship which are awarded to early-career science researchers who have the potential of becoming leaders in their fields.
The Fellowship will support new research into how the Earth’s mantle deforms over time – a crucial but uncertain factor in measuring how quickly ice sheets are melting in a warming climate.
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet contains enough ice to raise global sea levels by more than three metres.
Over recent decades, it has been losing ice at an accelerating rate, raising concerns for coastal communities worldwide.
Around 770 million people live in areas less than five metres above sea level, making accurate sea-level projections critically important.
Scientists primarily track Antarctic ice loss by measuring changes in the Earth’s gravity field using satellites.
As ice melts and mass shifts, these changes can be detected from space.
However, satellites cannot separate gravity changes caused by ice loss from those linked to other processes, such as atmospheric changes, groundwater movement, or mass movement within the Earth.
One of the biggest challenges is accounting for glacial isostatic adjustment – the slow movement of the Earth’s surface and interior mantle in response to changes in the weight of ice sheets.
When large ice sheets melt, the land beneath them gradually rebounds as the mantle flows back into place.
This process can take hundreds to thousands of years and produces gravity changes that contaminate measurements of modern ice loss.
Crucially, the speed at which the mantle flows – known as its rheology – cannot be measured directly and remains one of the largest uncertainties in Antarctic ice-loss estimates.
Grace will investigate mantle behaviour by studying Earth deformation in Patagonia, a region experiencing both rapid ice loss and the effects of a recent major earthquake.
Examining how the Earth responds to these different stresses across timescales ranging from decades to millennia will provide new insight into how the mantle flows.
This improved understanding will then be applied to Antarctica, helping scientists better correct satellite gravity data and produce more accurate estimates of current and future sea-level rise.
I am delighted to have been awarded this prestigious fellowship from the Royal Society, which will enable me to drive forward my research on the Earth’s rheology. This work is crucial for accurately quantifying ice loss in a changing climate.
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