Hosts: Alexander Huth, Olga Sergienko, and Nicole Schlegel

Fracture of ice shelves, the floating extensions of continental ice sheets, is a crucial component in the evolution of ice sheets and their impact on climate. The primary ice-shelf fracture processes are crevassing and calving of large tabular icebergs. These processes weaken ice shelves, which increases the flux of upstream grounded ice into the ocean, resulting in sea-level rise. Then, calved icebergs release meltwater as they drift, which impacts ocean circulation, sea-ice formation, and the marine biosphere.

The intern will join a research team that is developing methods to represent ice-shelf evolution, tabular calving, and iceberg evolution within GFDL climate models. The intern will be involved with efforts to use satellite observations to calibrate these new methods, or in implementing the methods within the climate models. The potential candidate should have an interest in glaciology, oceanography, remote sensing, computer science, physics, or math. Experience with programming (for example, Python or MATLAB) and analyzing/processing datasets would be useful.