Funded PhD Studentship: DTC GEO 35 - Quantifying glacier calving in Greenland using glacial earthquakes: using glacial earthquakes as a means of remotely sensing calving losses from the ice sheet

Swansea University is a UK top 30 institution for research excellence (Research Excellence Framework 2014), and has been named Welsh University of the Year 2017 by The Times and Sunday Times Good University Guide.

Swansea Science DTC is a community committed to undertaking world-class research that has a positive impact globally and we have a fully-funded PhD scholarship for 2017/2018 entry.

We are recognised as one of the foremost global centres for teaching and research in human and physical geography. In the 2014 Research Excellence Framework (REF) Geography at Swansea was ranked joint 9th in the UK for research impact and 11th in the UK for research environment. Our research environment (how the Department supports research staff and students) and the impact of our research (its value to society) were both judged to be 100% world leading or internationally excellent.

Our internationally active research staff and large community of postgraduate researchers create a dynamic and inspirational environment in which to study. You will also benefit from our exceptional facilities, including: a powerful workstation for all Earth Observation postgraduates; ‘Blue Ice 2’ supercomputer, containing 600 cores and 1.2TB memory distributed over 50 nodes with 33TB data storage, used mainly for climate and glaciological modelling; specialist laboratory suites for stable isotope ratio analysis; tree ring analysis; extraction and identification of organic compounds; pollen extraction and analysis; rainfall simulation; tephra analysis; soil and sediment characterisation.

Description of Project:

Glacial earthquakes are large amplitude (M~5), long-period (>30s) seismic events which result from the calving of icebergs at lightly-grounded marine-terminating outlet glaciers. Calving events are the cause of about half of mass lost from the Greenland ice sheet, and the numbers of glacial earthquakes in Greenland have increased 7-fold in the last 2 decades and their occurrence has spread northwards. This studentship aims to explore the use of glacial earthquakes as a means of remotely sensing calving losses from the ice sheet, in particular (i) using GPS and other data already collected at Helheim Glacier in south-east Greenland to quantify relationships between the icebergs calved (e.g., iceberg size, aspect ratio etc) and the characteristics of the resulting glacial earthquake; (ii) comparison of the changing spatial and temporal occurrence of glacial earthquakes with calving records from remotely sensed data around the Greenland ice sheet. The project may also involve the use of analogue laboratory measurements.