Studying Ice to Understand Climate Change

Professors Haim Waisman and David Keyes have been awarded an $867,000 grant from the Department of Energy to study the fracture of polar ice sheets to better understand the effects of current climate change.

Waisman, an assistant professor of civil engineering, is the principal investigator on the project. He and Keyes, The Fu Foundation Professor of Applied Mathematics, will be part of a multi-institutional team that includes Dr. Ray Tuminaro and Dr. Erik Boman from Sandia National Laboratories and Dr. Robin Bell from Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

The project will investigate the complex fracture of ice and seek to understand its role within larger ice sheet simulations and global climate change. At the present time, ice fracture is not explicitly considered within ice sheet models, due in part to large computational costs associated with the accurate modeling of this complex phenomenon.

However, the professors say the fracture not only plays an extremely important role in regional behavior but also influences ice dynamics over much larger zones in ways that are currently not well understood. Dramatic illustrations of fracture-induced phenomena most notably include the collapse of ice shelves in Antarctica.

Other fracture examples include ice calving (fracture of icebergs), and draining of supraglacial lakes through a complex network of cracks, a so-called ice sheet plumbing system that is believed to cause accelerated ice sheet flows due essentially to lubrication of the contact surface with the ground.

“These dramatic changes are emblematic of the ongoing change in the Earth's polar regions and highlight the important role of fracturing ice,” says Waisman. “To model ice fracture, we will develop a simulation capability centered around the extended finite element method, developing sophisticated multiscale algorithms and employing massive, parallel supercomputers with thousands of processors available at national labs.”