Most of my research to date has been on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), portions of which are know to be undergoing changes over short timescales (tens to hundreds of years) relative to timescales usually associated with changes on large ice sheets (thousands to hundreds of thousands of years). These changes are largely linked to the behavior of large, fast flowing "ice streams" (Several good, general review articles concerning the status of WAIS research can be accessed from the links page). My research has focussed on understanding the range of behaviors these ice streams exhibit, the cause for these behaviors, and predicting what affect the ice streams may have on the WAIS in the future.
I first started doing research in 1996 as a graduate student at the Ohio State University, where I worked with Ian Whillans studying what was then called Ice Stream B (it has since been re-named Whillans Ice Stream, in honor of Ian after his death in 2001). That work led to a continuing interest in what takes place in the ice stream "onset" regions, where there is a transition from slow moving inland ice to fast moving streaming ice.
After finishing my MSc at OSU in 1998, I went on to work with Robert Bindschadler at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. While there, I continued to work on understanding ice stream onset regions and that work eventually led us to question if and how an ice stream onset region might migrate inland over time. This is an important process to understand for a number of reasons. First, a long ice stream is able to draw down ice from the interior of an ice sheet better than a short one. Second, long ice streams serve as "conduits" along which changes at the ice sheet margin can propagate rapidly into the ice sheet interior (much more rapidly than along non-streaming ice).
I left NASA GSFC in 2001 in order to return to graduate school and pursue my doctorate at the University of Washington. The primary research project that I worked on while at UW was developing and using an appropriate ice-flow model to investigate how ice stream onset regions might migrate inland over time and what physical processes control and limit that behavior. A more detailed discussion of that work and the papers and presentations that resulted from it can be found here.
Copies of my MSc and Phd theses and scientific publications can be dowloaded as .pdf files at the publications link to the left.
