Glaciologists’ experiments lead to slip law for better forecasts of glacier speed, sea-level rise

CATEGORIES: News

Neal Iverson has worked with the ring-shear device in his laboratory freezer for more than a decade to study the huge forces involved in glacier sliding. Photo by Christopher Gannon.

A paper published online today by the journal Science describes the new slip law and the experiments and data that motivate it. Authors are Lucas Zoet, a postdoctoral research associate at Iowa State from 2012 to 2015 and now an assistant professor of geoscience at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Iverson.

Why do glaciologists need a slip law?

“The potential collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is the single largest source of uncertainty in estimations of future sea-level rise, and this uncertainty results, in part, from imperfectly modeled ice-sheet processes,” Zoet and Iverson wrote in their paper.

The full story can be found here.