New Technology for Glaciology

Glaciers are the "early warning system" of climate change. Both the polar ice sheets and high-mountain glaciers are changing rapidly, and this has a direct effect on lives and livelihoods. Greenland alone lost enough ice in the summer of 2019 to raise global sea levels by 2.2mm, so forecasting glacier behaviour is vital if we are to protect people and infrastructure in coastal regions from future flooding caused by climate change. To produce these forecasts, we need better observations of glaciers, especially from within and below the glaciers where observations are scarce.

Traditionally, glaciologists collect their data in the summer seasons - tramping up mountains or travelling up onto the polar ice sheets - at the time of year when the weather is most favourable. This limits the opportunity for in-person data collection to only a small number of weeks each year. It is highly desirable to collect data all year round and bring the data back for analysis in real time, but very few glaciologists have access to the engineering expertise required to make this work. Recent advances in remote sensing from satellites allow glaciologists to see the surface of glaciers from space, with new data every few days. But remote sensing only tells part of the story - it doesn't show what's going on beneath the glaciers, and it needs verifying with "ground truth" observations from the field.

My background is in engineering, and I've spent the majority of my career in industry designing new technology for commercial use. I now want to bring these same skills to radically change the way glaciology is done - by developing new instruments and data infrastructure to collect data from glaciers in real time all year round.

The key question I aim to answer with these new instruments is understanding how liquid water flowing in and through a glacier affects the glacier's movement. Water from melting snow flows into streams and rivers on the glacier surface. But it also percolates down through the snowpack out of sight, and the streams themselves disappear into holes in the glacier called "moulins". These pass through the glacier to its bed, and the water forms channels between the glacier ice and the ground beneath. Remote sensing can observe water on the surface but cannot see beneath - so we need to observe in the field. Using my engineering skills, I will develop a suite of new instruments to measure in the snow, in streams and rivers, and in the channels beneath the ice. Wireless communications and tracking will let us observe the unexplored water channels beneath glaciers. With a team of researchers from engineering and earth science and collaborators around the world, I will bring these to fruition, test them on glaciers in Switzerland and make valuable observations on the fastest-moving glacier in Greenland.

Most importantly, I will share my new instruments and software freely as an "open source" design. This means that anyone will be able to look at my designs, see how they work, and copy or modify them for their own use. These low-cost, convenient, wireless instruments will be valuable beyond glaciology - the core technologies (sensors, renewable energy supplies, communications and data infrastructure) have applications right across environmental science. My vision is to create an ecosystem of open source instrumentation - with scientists and engineers sharing their instruments and building upon each other's designs.

I am uniquely placed to benefit from this fellowship because I have both industrial engineering expertise and experience of working in polar science. It will jump-start my academic career, allowing me to develop exciting new technology and use it to conduct globally significant scientific work. My open source vision will change the way glaciology is done, benefiting future generations of scientists, and establishing me as a global leader in environmental science.