A Frozen Pint of Science!

During the summer months low elevation areas of the Greenland Ice Sheet begin to melt. This results in a loss of ice mass and contributes to the current rise in sea level. But what happens to the water that is produced? Here I look at the intricate drainage networks that form seasonally, the controls on these networks, and how drainage to the bed through ice over a kilometre thick can influence ice flow by changing the slipperiness of the bed.

Naomi is the Leverhulme Trust artist-in-residence at The University of Sheffield Department of Geography for 2017-2018. Hart spent August of 2017 in Svalbard, Norway in the field with students and faculty from the Polar and Alpine Change Masters programme. This body of work comes from her observations of scientific method and enquiry there and investigates the, often opposing, man-made interventions present in the ice fields of the High Arctic.

During the last Ice Age, a vast sheet of ice covered the majority of the British Isles. As the world warmed, this ice shrank back to higher ground. Scientists have spent over 150 years studying the ice sheet, meaning we know more about how the last British Ice Sheet retreated than any other past ice sheet. Now, we feed the mass of collected knowledge into computer simulations of the last Ice Age. We use a supercomputer to simulate the end of the last Ice Age. What mysteries will come out of the simulations, and how can the lessons help us learn about ice sheet change today?

Antarctica is a frozen desert. However, recent findings reveal a widespread network of rivers, lakes and even a large waterfall on the surface of the ice-sheets. The most extreme example of this occurs at 85°S, on Shackleton Glacier, where a system of lakes and rivers transport water over 70 km across the glacier surface. Though noted by explorers in the early twentieth-century, these systems are understudied and pose interesting questions regarding the future of the Antarctic ice-sheets.