Meghana RanganathanAssistant Professor

Research Focus:

Glaciology, geodynamics, cryosphere/climate

Email:

miranganathan@uchicago.edu

Office:

Hinds 389

Biography

I am a glaciologist interested in ice sheet dynamics and the role of the cryosphere in the climate system. Before joining the University of Chicago's Department of Geophysical Sciences in 2024, I was as NOAA Climate & Global Change Postdoctoral Fellow, hosted at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and I received my Ph.D from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences. 

Research Interests

The largest source of uncertainty in projections of sea-level rise lies in how Earth's ice sheets will respond to climate change. This behavior is so uncertain because there remains a lot unknown about how glaciers and ice sheets behave - from the microphysical processes that occur within the ice to the macroscale interactions between ice sheet and the climate system around them. My research seeks to incorporate an interdisciplinary perspective, drawing from materials science, solid earth geophysics, applied mathematics, and related fields, to:

• improve our understanding of how micro-scale physics affects macro-scale flow and fracture in ice
• build models and parameterizations of these physical processes, in order to improve the physical fidelity of ice sheet models that ultimately produce projections of sea-level rise

Selected Publications

Ranganathan, M. & Minchew, B., (2024). A modified viscous flow law for natural glacier ice: Scaling from laboratories to ice sheets, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 121(23), doi:10.1073/pnas.2309788121

Ranganathan, M., Minchew, B., Meyer, C., & Pec, M., (2021). Recrystallization of ice enhances the creep and vulnerability to fracture of ice shelves, Earth and Planetary Science Letters, 576:117219. doi:10.1016/j.epsl.2021.117219

Ranganathan, M., Minchew, B., Gudmundsson, G.H., & Meyer, C., (2021) A new approach to inferring basal drag and ice rheology in ice streams, with applications to West Antarctic Ice Streams. Journal of Glaciology, 67(262), 229-242. doi:10.1017/jog.2020.95

Ranganathan, M., Lalk, E., Freese, E.M., Freilich, M.A., Wilcots, J., Duffy, M.L., Shivamoggi, R., (2021). Trends in the representation of women amongst geoscience faculty from 1999-2020: the long road towards gender parity, AGU Advances, 2(3). doi:10.1029/2021AV000436