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Dr Rebecca Dell, with Prof. Ian Willis and Prof. Neil Arnold, from the Scott Polar Research Institute, have used machine learning to analyse hundreds of satellite images to map lakes and slush across 57 of Antarctica's largest ice shelves between 2013 and 2021. Their work is published in Nature Geoscience. Whereas previous work had only mapped lakes, they show that including slush doubles the ice shelf area covered by melt water in mid-summer. As the weight of water on ice shelves has the potential to fracture them, causing their collapse, the work has important implications for future sea level rise, as ice shelf loss causes Antarctica's massive glaciers to flow more rapidly from land to sea. The work is done together with Dr Alison Banwell, U. Colorado, Boulder, and PhD student Sophie de Roda Husman, Delft University of Technology.

Professor Ian Willis and Dr Rebecca Dell, from the Scott Polar Research Institute, have measured flexure and fracture of an Antarctic ice shelf in response to surface meltwater ponding. The study, published in the Journal of Glaciology, is the first to measure such bending and breaking, with in-situ instruments. The work was done with colleagues from the Universities of Colorado Boulder, Chicago, and Oxford.

The coming week (14-19th April) sees the annual gathering of geoscientists from around the world, at the European Geophysical Union General Assembly, in Vienna. Members of the Department will be contributing, giving 16 presentations (either as posters or orals), convening one session during the week and appearing as co-authors on even more presentations. These contributions will showcase the cutting edge physical geography research that takes place across the Department, spanning the fields of cryospheric science, atmospheric modelling, geochronology, palaeoclimate and geohazards.