OUR SUSTAINABLE FUTURE: WATER

Sustainability Spotlight: Faculty

BREAKING THE ICE

Justin Burton, Associate Professor, Physics

It’s known as a glacial slushy, mosh pit or, for a bit of class, ice mélange. This granular mix of broken icebergs, which can extend hundreds of feet deep, spills out in front of the world’s largest glaciers and can inhibit their forward motion. It’s one of the factors that Justin Burton, an associate professor in the Department of Physics, is striving to understand better as he researches dynamic ice loss, which occurs at the boundary between ice and ocean, and accounts for around 30 percent of total ice loss. “That boundary is what’s going to control the future of large ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica,” he says, “and ultimately control sea level rise.” 

Through modeling in his lab, Burton has identified some of the forces and glacial processes at work along that critical boundary. When some icebergs tip over, they cause a domino effect that initiates other calving events. Other calving icebergs push on the glacier and cause earthquakes, the magnitude of which is influenced by the size and geometry of the calved iceberg itself. With ice mélange, he’s studying how it not only affects the transport of warm water into the fjords, but also can inhibit future calving events. “The less ice there is, the more warming there will be­ — and thus, even less ice,” he says. “Knowing the amount of ice coverage on the planet and predicting its future evolution plays a very important role in climate studies.” 

—Kristin Baird Rattini