WAIS Workshops 2019-2021: An Annual Transdisciplinary Forum for Studies of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet by the next Generation of Polar Scientists

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Workshop has been held annually for the past quarter century. It offers a key venue for transdisciplinary scientific exchange on the state and behavior of WAIS, processes that influence its changing behavior, and projections of its future mass balance and sea-level contribution. The community-based structure of the workshops brings together students, early-career, and senior scientists who are investigating WAIS using a wide variety of tools. Researchers present on finding obtained from ground-based and shipborne methods, airborne geophysics, satellite remote-sensing, and numerical modeling. Group interactions facilitate collaborations and help researchers answer difficult, but essential, questions regarding the fate of WAIS. This award provides partial support for the next three years of WAIS Workshops, to be held in Julian, California (2019), Sterling, Virginia (2020), and the Denver, Colorado region (2021).This set of three workshops will (1) promote the dissemination of innovative WAIS science with dedicated open discussion periods, (2) welcome new scientific ideas from disciplines that were underrepresented in past workshops, (3) establish new initiatives to grow a more inclusive community and accessible meeting that connects with community college educators, and (4) implement a formal mentoring plan for graduate students, post-doctoral, and other early-career researchers. These efforts will maximize the efficacy of the WAIS Workshop as a forum that pushes the boundaries of scientific understanding of WAIS. They will also ensure that the research community is positioned to engage and support the next generation of polar scientists.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.