Ice sheet and glacier stability in a warming world: Projecting future iceberg and sea level risks via rapid modelling and satellite image analysis

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This fellowship will transform our understanding of how the ice sheets and glaciers at both poles will contribute to future sea level change, and anticipate future iceberg risks impacting the people, businesses and governments in these regions. Building on my recent work (Lea, 2018), significant cloud computing resources will be used to facilitate automated analysis of the unprecedented volume of Arctic and Antarctic satellite imagery that is generated every day. This is the first time that analysis at such scales will be undertaken, and would be otherwise unachievable using current glacier monitoring approaches.Using results from this real-time updated analysis, a combination of new physically based and empirically based machine learning models will provide the first global assessment of glacier stability and framework to monitor this. This will allow significant improvements to short (<1 year) and long term (decadal) plans for infrastructure, industry projects and security as Arctic sea ice declines and both poles undergo major environmental changes. These factors are especially important for the UK as it impacts:- The environment and security of UK administered territories in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean.- UK business making informed decisions on future project viability in polar regions, where icebergs pose a major hazard to shipping and infrastructure such as ports, rigs and subsea pipelines.- The anticipated opening of the Northwest and Northeast Passage trade routes, offering UK business opportunities to significantly reduce the length and environmental impact of shipping. The future viability of these routes due to sudden glacier retreat and changing iceberg risks will have major implications for future UK supply chains between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have highlighted that the stability of marine terminating ice margins is a major uncertainty in global sea level change projections, and by extension iceberg risk. The existing barriers to achieving a global assessment of glacier stability are that:- Current approaches to data collection (even for individual glaciers) can be extremely time intensive.- The considerable computational power required by numerical models of glacier stability limits researchers to exploring only a few potential future scenarios.Consequently only a handful of the 100s-1000s of these glaciers at each pole have been studied in detail, leaving our knowledge of future glacier and ice sheet stability woefully incomplete and poorly constrained. This fellowship's innovative image and stability analyses will directly address these challenges.Ensuring that these novel findings have impact is built in as a key objective of this fellowship. Support from project partners will allow substantial and rarely achievable levels of engagement with the UK Government on objectives highlighted in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's recent publication 'Beyond the Ice: UK policy towards the Arctic' (2018), including: Projecting global influence; Protecting people and the environment; and Promoting prosperity. Three stakeholder events spanning the fellowship will also allow UK business to directly highlight their key concerns and help direct the generation of data products. These will be designed to allow UK business to make better informed decisions on the viability of ongoing and future projects in the polar regions.Informed decision making relating to infrastructure at key locations is also in the UK's long term interest for the successful development of future trade routes. To this end, a three month placement at the Greenland Government's geoscience consultancy (Asiaq Greenland Survey) and regular trips as part of fieldwork to Greenland's largest city and deepwater port, Nuuk, will allow regular engagement with policymakers and industry at a pivotal location for the future development of the Northwest Passage shipping route.