Chile, Greenland Glacier Study: $2 million
Pat Brennan, Orange County Register
A UC Irvine scientist will receive a $2.2 million grant to study glaciers in Chile and Greenland, potentially shedding further light on the links among vanishing glaciers, rising sea levels and a warming planet.
Eric Rignot, a researcher at UC Irvine and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena who specializes in polar ice, will measure subtle changes in gravity during helicopter flights over the glaciers and ice fields of Patagonia.
He’ll also measure the ice using ground-penetrating radar.
Little information exists on the nature of the Patagonian ice, he said. No U.S. agency conducts ice surveys of the area.
“For most of them there are actually no data on how thick the ice is,” said Rignot, who was awarded the grant by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.
“Mostly the data can construct the thickness of the ice, so we can look at total ice volume,” he said. “We can look also at the details of what the bed looks like underneath the glaciers, the bumps and hollows, and how that compares with the flow of ice.”
He also plans to make a seamless map of the transition the glacier makes between the land and the ocean.
“That is not something people have been able to produce so far,” he said. “These kinds of data will be very useful for numerical models of glacier evolution.”
Scientists say rapid ice loss at both poles, likely a product of global warming, appears to be accelerating, contributing to rising sea levels that could, by some projections, increase by several feet by 2100.
