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Dave Wattam of BAS
Operations Programme Manager
UK Logistics
Affiliation
BAS: British Antarctic Survey
Email
dwat@bas.ac.uk

Dave joined British Antarctic Survey in 2001 and is currently the Operations Programme Manager. He is responsible for the planning and delivery of the global annual programme to Antarctica, including that for the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, translating scientific requirements for logistics support in to operational delivery.

Writer Douglas Fox accompanied ITGC researchers into the field in 2019/2020, where he witnessed TARSAN scientists Erin Pettit, Ted Scambos, MELT scientist Britney Schmidt, and others drill into the Thwaites Glacier ice shelf to learn about the shelf's properties and its thickness. What surprised the team the most was the vast amount of life under the shelf. 

Read the article here.

The ‘Cliff Notes’ on ice-cliff failure

The retreat of large glaciers that drain the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets could expose immense ice-cliffs at newly-bared calving faces, which are the exposed ends of glaciers where, in these cases, glacier ice meets the ocean. Past a certain height, these ice cliffs will become susceptible to collapsing from high stresses, a process known as structural ice-cliff failure. Read more in this blog post that describes recent research published in Nature Communications.
New research on the Antarctic Ice Sheet describes that sea-level could rise 17-24 cm if the Paris Agreement goals are not met. If the world exceeds three degrees Celsius of global warming, there will be rapid and unstoppable sea-level rise by 2100 and if the rate of global warming continues on its current trajectory, a tipping point will be reached by 2060, past which these consequences would be “irreversible on multi-century timescales.”
Charlotte Schmoonman
Postdoctoral Researcher
Affiliation
AWI: Alfred Wegener Institute
Email
charlotte.schoonman@awi.de
Project
GHOST
Charlie Schoonman is a geophysicist and glaciologist working at the Alfred Wegener Institute. Her research focuses on investigating ice sheet dynamics using active and passive seismological techniques. As part of the GHOST team, she will assist with the acquisition and analysis of a seismic survey of Thwaites Glacier, using a vibrator source to create a continuous profile of the subsurface along the GHOST traverse.
Dorothee Vallot
Postdoctoral Researcher
Affiliation
Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute
Email
dorothee.vallot@smhi.se
Project
DOMINOS

Dorothée Vallot is a Postdoctoral researcher on the DOMINOS project. Based at the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI), oceanographic research group, she will spend part of her time at the Institut des Géosciences de l'Environnement (IGE) in Grenoble and at St Andrews University. The aim of her research project is to understand the processes involved at the ocean-ice interface of Thwaites glacier by coupling a continuum ice flow model (Elmer/Ice), a particle model (HiDEM) and an ocean model (NEMO).

For the first time, researchers have collected data from underneath the remote Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica using an underwater robot. Findings reveal that the supply of warm water to the glacier is larger than previously thought, triggering concerns of faster melting and accelerating ice flow. The findings are published this week (10 April 2021) in the journal Science Advances.
Louise Borthwick
Department
Earth & Environmental Sciences
PhD Student
Affiliation
Temple University
Email
tul16152@temple.edu
Project
GHOST

Louise Borthwick is a PhD student at Temple University using seismic and gravity techniques to study the distribution of geologic structures under Thwaites. She hopes to understand how these form and potentially link them to tectonic processes. Improved understand of how tectonic affects ice dynamics on Thwaites will help improve predictions of sea level rise from ice sheet models.

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