UKPN Seminar: How is climate change shrinking our ice sheets?

Why are our ice sheets shrinking, and how can we tell it’s climate change?

Polina is an early career polar scientist who has just finished a Master’s degree in Climate Science at Cambridge and the British Antarctic Survey, specialising in climate change attribution of ice sheet mass loss. She strives to understand the influence of climate change on rapidly shrinking glaciers and ice shelves. While Greenland melt is driven by atmospheric warming directly, a more complex picture emerges in Antarctica. Ice shelf processes are difficult to observe and parameterise, and the processes by which climate change enhances ice shelf retreat are not fully understood.

In this seminar, she will explain what we know, what we don’t know, and how we might be able to find out.