Douglas R. MacAyealProfessor, Emeritus

Research Focus:

Glaciology, cryospheric science, ice and climate

Email:

drm7@uchicago.edu

Phone:

(773) 702-8027

Office:

Hinds 413

Research Interests

I study the behavior of ice and snow as a means to better constrain how the cryosphere both drives and responds to other elements of the climate system, both in the past and present.

I use the tools of fluid dynamics, seismology, remote sensing and computational methods to study the behavior of the large ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland, and would characterize my style of research as being a mixture of field observation, numerical modeling and theory.

My current work, done in collaboration with my students and with Dr. Alison Banwell from Scott Polar Research Institute in the UK, is focused on the understanding of supraglacial lakes and their impacts on ice shelves. A field season on the McMurdo Ice Shelf in Antarctica is anticipated for the December 2015 to February 2016 time frame.

Read about it here.

Selected Publications

• Nekrasov, P., & MacAyeal, D. (2023). Ocean wave blocking by periodic surface rolls fortifies Arctic ice shelves. Journal of Glaciology, 1-11. doi:10.1017/jog.2023.58
• Coffey, N., MacAyeal, D., Copland, L., Mueller, D., Sergienko, O., Banwell, A., & Lai, C. (2022). Enigmatic surface rolls of the Ellesmere Ice Shelf. Journal of Glaciology, 68(271), 867-878. doi:10.1017/jog.2022.3
• MacAyeal, D. R. (2019) Revisiting Weertman's Tombstone Bed, Ann. Glaciol. in press, doi:10.1017/aog.2019.31
• MacAyeal, D. R., J. Lin, A. F. Banwell, E. A. Okal, I. C. Willis, B. Goodsell and G. J. Macdonald, (2019). Diurnal seismicity cycle linked to sub-surface melting on an ice shelf, Annals of Glaciology,  60(79), 137-157 (doi: 10.1017/aog.2018.29)
• MacAyeal, D. R., (2018). Seismology gets under the skin of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. Geophysical Research letters, 45(20), 11,173-11,176 (doi: 10.1029/2018GL080366)
• MacAyeal, Douglas R., Olga V. Sergienko, and Alison F. Banwell. "A model of viscoelastic ice-shelf flexure." Journal of Glaciology (2015).
• MacAyeal, Douglas R., Yitan Wang, and Emile A. Okal. "Ambient seismic, hydroacoustic, and flexural gravity wave noise on a tabular iceberg." Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface 120.2 (2015): 200-211.
• Banwell, Alison F., et al. "Supraglacial lakes on the Larsen B ice shelf, Antarctica, and at Paakitsoq, West Greenland: a comparative study." Annals of Glaciology 55.66 (2014): 1-8.