Oceans at MIT

Striving to understand, harness and sustain Earth's defining frontier.

http://oceans.mit.edu

America/New_York

20171105T020000 -0400 -0500 20181104T020000 EST 20180311T020000 -0500 -0400 EDT asmkr42urnv29bn7kehvf58q8s@google.com 20180503T085018Z MIT Seminar | PAOC Oceanography and Climate Sack Lunch Modeling iceberg drift and decay in modern and glacial climates Under global warming, the calving of icebergs into the polar oceans is expected to increase. As a result, the role that icebergs play in Earth's climate system has received a recent surge of interest, and efforts are underway to explicitly represent icebergs in GCMs. A better understanding of how icebergs drift and decay will help facilitate an accurate representation of icebergs and guide the interpretation of GCM results. In this talk I will present an idealized analytical model that we developed to aid this effort. I will use the model to address (i) which climate model variables are most important to accurately model iceberg evolution and (ii) whether climate models do a good job simulating these variables. I then will turn to episodes of massive iceberg discharge, called Heinrich Events, which occurred during the last glacial period. These events are believed to have had large-scale impacts on the global climate system. However, modeling icebergs that lived and melted more than 10,000 years ago comes with its own challenges, as we will see. 20170419T120000 20170419T130000 54-915 0

SLS — Till Wagner (Scripps)