Swansea Glaciology Research Group

Academic staff: Steph Cornford, John Hiemstra, Bernd Kulessa, Adrian Luckman, Tavi Murray

Honorary chairs: Helen Fricker (Scripps Institute of Oceanography) , David Vaughan OBE (British Antarctic Survey) 

Postdoctoral staff: Suzanne Bevan, Glenn Jones, Jordan Mertes 

Postgraduate students: Helen Hallang, Craig Hammock, Emily Hudson, Rebecca Schlegel, Astrid Zimmerman

BEAMISH, the first project to drill through, instrument and retrieve sediments from beneath the 2.2km thick Rutford Ice Stream in Antarctica. The project is funded by NERC and involves investigators from Swansea, British Antarctic Survey, Penn State, Leeds and Bristol. Project student: Rebecca Schlegel@HotWaterOnIce

CALISMO (Calving Laws for Ice Sheet models, 2017-21) is a NERC-funded project led by St Andrews University that aims to radically improve the accuracy of sea-level rise predictions for the 6th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR6). The project will develop a rigorous, comprehensive theory of calving processes, critically tested against observations, and apply the knowledge gained from detailed models to develop the simple, reliable calving laws needed to predict ice sheet response to climate change. The Swansea Glaciology Group leads the observational part of this project.

CPOM (Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling) is a NERC Centre of Excellence that studies processes in the Earth’s polar latitudes that can affect the Earth’s albedo, polar atmosphere and ocean circulation, and global sea level. The project is funded by NERC and involves investigators from Swansea, Leeds, Reading, UCL, and Bristol.

GHOST (Geophysical Habitat of Subglacial Thwaites, 2018-2025) is a US-UK-Germany collaborative project that is part of the joint NSF-NERC funded International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration, and will identify whether basal conditions can facilitate rapid retreat of the Thwaites Glacier grounding line, expand its boundaries and deglaciate adjacent marine basins. The Swansea Glaciology Group will characterise geothermal heat and groundwater flow from the earth’s upper crust into the base of the glacier using magnetotelluric (MT) geophysical surveys. Find out more about Geophysical Habitat of Subglacial Thwaites (GHOST) 

ACEAS is the Australian Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science, led by the University of Tasmania and funded by the Australian Research Council (ARC), with Swansea Glaciology Group as a formal international member. ACEAS provides the scientific umbrella for a host of ARC-funded collaborative projects in East Antarctica with Swansea Glaciology Co-PIs that presently include ‘Towards an Early Warning of Antarctic Ice Sheet Collapse from Seismology’ (2019-2021), ‘Rapid Deployment Seismic Recorders for Interdisciplinary Antarctic Research’ (2020-21) and ‘Detecting Change in the Outlet Glaciers of East Antarctica using Seismology’ (2021-2023), as well as ‘Sediments and saturation at the ice sheet-bedrock interface from passive seismology’ (2019-22) funded by the Australian Department of Agriculture, Water and the Environment. Fin out more about the Geography East Antarctica project

CORE (Climate costs of boreal forest clear-cutting – a multiscale experiment, 2018-22) is funded by the Swedish Research Council and aims to assess the biotic and abiotic climate effects (“costs”) of rotation forestry at the boreal research site with Sweden's longest record of GHG exchanges. A rich dataset of below and above ground measures for a full GHG budget will be used to calibrate an ecosystem model and analyse scenarios of alternative reforestation strategies driven by climate model data of the three main RCPs. Swansea glaciologists provide critical geophysical expertise in assessing the coupled surface-subsurface hydrological processes operating at the glacial-till dominated forest study site

CRUCIAL (Discovering the CRUstal structure beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet and its Control of Ice mass loss And sea Level rise, 2018-21) is a Sêr Cymru II Fellowship project that aims to constrain the shallow crustal structure beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet using innovative seismological techniques, based on ambient noise and Rayleigh wave ellipticity, to evaluate the degree to which the sheet-wide sub-ice geology and geothermal heat flux control the onset of and facilitate fast outlet glacier flow.

PROTECT (Projecting Sea-Level Rise: from Ice Sheets to Local Implications, 2020-24) is a European Union Horizon 2020 project coordinated by the Institute for Geoscience and Environmental research (IGE) of the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). Université Grenoble Alpes, with partners from the UK and across the EU, including Swansea University. Advanced art atmosphere, ocean, and ice sheet models are combined with satellite observations from the last 20 years to produce state of the art ensemble forecasts of ice sheet and glacier extent in Antarctica, Greenland, and beyond, and sea level rise, and global coastal impacts over the next century 

IGIS (Impact of Deep Groundwater on Ice Stream Flow in West Antarctica, 2021-2027) is a NERC-funded project led by the Swansea Glaciology Group that involves collaboration with the British Antarctic Survey, the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London. The project will identify the role that interactions between crustal groundwater and geothermal heat fluxes and the Institute Ice Stream and Bungenstock Ice Rise play in regulating the stability of the central Weddell Sea Sector of West Antarctica. The project combines computer simulations with in situ seismic and magnetotelluric geophysical surveys as well as satellite remote sensing.

RIPFISH (RIft Propagation For Ice SHeet models (2022-25). By incorporating the processes of ice fracture and rift propagation into ice sheet models, this NERC-funded project led by the Swansea Glaciology Group will reduce the uncertainties in forecasts of the contribution of the Antarctic ice sheets to sea level rise. We will collect new field data from the Larsen C Ice Shelf and use satellite data to better understand ice heterogeneity and controls on rift development and propagation. A new fracture physics approach will be developed to simulate rift propagation and this will be implemented in a new generation of ice sheet model.

Alfred-Wegener Institute for Marine and Polar Research

Australian Antarctic Division

University of Tasmania

British Antarctic Survey

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

Scottish Association for Marine Sciences

and many UK and international universites

BEAMISH team, including Tavi Murray and Rebecca Schlegel from Swansea University, successfully drill 2km hole in Antarctic ice sheet 

The one trillion tonne iceberg: Larsen C Ice Shelf rift finally breaks through, research by Adrian Luckman

In reverse order the BBC News stories which reported on our monitoring of the Larsen C rift and subsequent iceberg calving:

Monster Iceberg's pivot and turns  

The 'monster' iceberg: what happened next?  

Giant iceberg splits from Antarctic 

Antarctic ice crack takes major turn  

Antarctic ice crack develops fork 

Larsen ice crack continues to open up 

Huge Antarctic iceberg poised to break away

Bevan, S.L., Luckman, A.J., Kuipers Munneke, P., Hubbard, B., Kulessa, B., Ashmore, D.W., 2018. Decline in surface melt duration on Larsen C Ice Shelf revealed by the advanced scatterometer (ASCAT). Earth and Space Science 5, 578-591.

Cook, A.J., Holland, P.R., Meredith, M.P., Murray, T., Luckman, A., Vaughan, D.G., 2016. Ocean forcing of glacier retreat in the western Antarctic Peninsula, Science, 353(6296), 283-286.

Cornford, S., Seroussi, H., Asay-Davis, X., Gudmundsson, G., Arthern, R., Borstad, C., Christmann, J., Santos, T., Feldmann, J., Goldberg, D., Hoffman, M., Humbert, A., Kleiner, T., Leguy, G., Lipscomb, W., Merino, N., Durand, G., Morlighem, M., Pollard, D...., & Yu, H., 2020. Results of the third Marine Ice Sheet Model Intercomparison Project (MISMIP+). The Cryosphere 14(7), 2283-2301.

Everett, A., Murray, T., Selmes, N., Holland, D., Reeve, D., 2021. The impacts of a subglacial discharge plume on calving, submarine melting and mélange mass loss at Helheim Glacier, south east Greenland. Journal of Geophysical Research Earth Surface 126, e2020JF005910.

Hogan, K.A., Ó Cofaigh, C., Jennings, A.E., Dowdeswell, J.A., Hiemstra, J.F., 2016. Deglaciation of a major palaeo-ice stream in Disko Trough, West Greenland. Quaternary Science Reviews 147, 5-26.

Kulessa, B. and 10 others (incl. Jones, G.A.) 2017. Seismic evidence for complex sedimentary control of Greenland Ice Sheet flow. Science Advances, 3(8), doi:10.1126/sciadv.1603071.

Kulessa, B., Booth, A., O'Leary, M., McGrath, D., King, E., Luckman, A., Holland, P., Jansen, D., Bevan, S., Thompson, S., Hubbard, B., 2019. Seawater softening of suture zones inhibits fracture propagation in Antarctic ice shelves. Nature Communications, 10(1), 5491.

Luckman, A., Benn, D. I., Cottier, F., Bevan, S., Nilsen, F., Inall, M., 2015. Calving rates at tidewater glaciers vary strongly with ocean temperature.Nature Communications 6, 8566.

Martin, D.F., Cornford, S.L., Payne, A.J., 2019. Millennial‐Scale Vulnerability of the Antarctic Ice Sheet to Regional Ice Shelf Collapse. Geophysical Research Letters, 46(3), 1467-1475.

Murray, T., Nettles, M., Selmes, N., Cathles, M., Burton, J., James, T.D., Edwards, S., Martin, I., O’Farrell, T., Aspey, R., Rutt, I. and Baugé, T., 2015. Reverse glacier motion during iceberg calving and the cause of glacier earthquakes, Science, 349(6245), 305-308.

• Geophysical field instrumentation (including radar, active-source seismic and geoelectrical instrumentation)
• High Performance Computing