Summer Internship in Glaciology
We are looking for motivated undergraduate students to participate in the University of Chicago's leadership alliance summer research program.
- Gain research experience in a small group setting
- Learn about recent changes to Earth's ice sheets and ice shelves
- Learn techniques in remote sensing or numerical modeling
Glaciology offers an a wide range of research tops and combines physics, geology, and computer science. Interested students should have taken physics and math courses at the college level, and be comfortable working with computers.
Project Ideas
We have come up with a few idea of summer projects. If any of these look interesting, or if you have you own idea, we encourage you to apply. (see SR-EIP for an application)
Observing Melt Ponds from Space
Recently, melt ponds on the surface of the Greenland ice sheet have been observed to drain from the surface of the ice to the bedrock-ice sheet interface, increasing the flow of ice towards the ocean. Understanding how surface melt ponds form and evolve is a big part of our research here in the glaciology group. One possible summer project would be to observe these melt ponds via satellite images. A student could either try to track a few ponds in time, or observe many ponds over one season.
This project would involve downloading satellite imagery and analyzing individual pond's changes over time. Students would:
- Gain experience with GIS (geographical information systems)
- Help build a useful data set
- Become familiar with different types of remote sensing data
Students could expand on this project in many ways, including analyzing local and transported melt water productions by combining satellite derived pond size data with a simplified melt water production model.
An example of some of the satellite images students could work with are shown bellow. These are two images from nearly one year apart. There are many similarities int he position and size of the ponds, but also, some differences.
A pair of satellite images nearly one year apart showing slight changes in melt pond size, shape and location.
Wave - Ice Sheet interactions
Ocean waves smash up against the ice sheet edge all the time! Do these waves, overtime, weaken the ice, eventually leading to the calving of icebergs?
This project would involve running numerical simulations to experiment and determine if wave - ice shelf interactions are an important mechanism in ice shelf calving events.
