Victoria alumnus aids understanding of ice sheets

Part of a $1 million donation last year to Victoria’s Antarctic Research Centre from alumnus Alan Eggers will help scientists better understand the relationship between glaciers and climate change.

The donation is being put to work with the announcement of a new Post-Doctoral Fellow in ice sheet modelling.

Dr Nick Golledge will arrive in March 2009 to take up this post and join the growing group of staff and students at the centre.

He joins Victoria from the British Geological Survey, and recently completed a PhD at the University of Edinburgh. He is an expert in the application of high-resolution ice sheet models to understand climate change and has published more than 15 papers in international journals.

Dr Andrew Mackintosh, leader of the centre’s glacier modelling team, says the team’s work focuses on the geological past, but has relevance for the future.

Dr Mackintosh and Dr Brian Anderson (with Dr Alun Hubbard at the University of Wales) are using glacier models as part of their Marsden Fast Start Grant to better understand the Southern Hemisphere climate during the peak of the last Ice Age.

“Having Nick on board will allow us to extend our work to Antarctica, where ice models provide an important tool for assessing the stability of Antarctic ice sheets to predicted warming,” says Dr Mackintosh.

He says there would be major economic consequences if Antarctica’s land ice melted.

“Ice sheet modelling may allow us to locate ‘threshold’ values of warming and atmospheric carbon dioxide, beyond which ice sheet retreat is unstoppable, and it may also help identify regions where the ice is relatively stable,” he says.

Prof. Peter Barrett, former director of the centre, says he is delighted at the expansion of this research, especially at a time when new research has revealed with increased confidence the influence of anthropogenic greenhouse gases on changing climate in the Antarctic and the Arctic.