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James is the Thwaites Field Coordinator for BAS, working closely with USAP to support the field component of ITGC.

Chris Kratt is the Laboratory Coordinator for the Center for Transformative Environmental Monitoring Programs (CTEMPs) at the University of Nevada, Reno. He provides technical and logistical support to Distributed Temperature Sensing (DTS) and Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS) research projects. He has a Masters degree in geology and co-instructs an undergraduate Applied Geophysics class. Mr. Kratt also has private sector experience conducting a variety of geophysical surveys.


Study published in Science sheds light on the future of the massive Thwaites Glacier and other ice sheets.

Scott Tyler is a Foundation Professor in the Department of Geological Sciences and Engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno and director of the CTEMPs Community User Facility focusing on the development and application of fiber-optic based sensing for environmental temperature and strain. His research spans the atmospheric boundary layer, through the soil and has included deep groundwater circulation. He is currently serving as past president of the AGU’s Hydrology Section.

With training in mechanical engineering and hydrogeology, his recent work focuses on the measurement of the dynamics and thermal evolution of Antarctic ice shelves and the ocean waters below. As part of the TARSAN project, he has helped developed the fiber-optic moorings of the AMIGOS weather stations and is developing a distributed acoustic monitoring system for both ice shelf and the ocean below for testing at Thwaites in 2021/2022.

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.”