Glaciers and ice sheets dynamics (CryoDyn)

Members — Tools and data — Projects and working groups — Scientific Publications

Team coordinated by Florent Gimbert.

The evolution of the cryosphere is associated with major societal issues related to sea level rise, climate feedbacks, water resources and natural hazards. However, numerous glaciological processes are poorly understood and therefore poorly represented in models. This makes the cryosphere a major source of uncertainty in the projections or forecasts associated with these issues.

The CryoDyn team’s overall objective is to better understand and describe the processes controlling ice dynamics, in order to better characterize and forecast the evolution of glaciers, polar ice sheets and sea ice. CryoDyn’s scientific objectives can be grouped into 5 main questions :

• Which physical processes control fracture/crevasse growth, calving and serac fall involved in large scale instabilities of glaciers, sea ice and ice shelves ?

• What will be the uncertainty on future sea level rise when we manage to represent the multi-scale interactions between the different components of the cryosphere and between the cryosphere and the other components of the climate system ?

• How to combine the large amount of new remote sensing data, field observation data, ensemble model simulations and the rapidly evolving data-driven methods to improve our understanding of the evolution of glaciers, ice sheets and sea ice ?

• How can we better understand the rheology and basal friction of glaciers, sea ice and ice streams, on Earth and on icy moons of the Solar system, from innovative geophysical observations, dedicated laboratory experiments and theoretical and model developments ?

• How to adapt our way of working to the environmental and societal challenges identified by our research, improving parity, inclusion and reducing our impact on the environment ?

These questions fall into two main research axes that are detailed below.