Shaun Marcott
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Earth & Environmental Science
How fast can ice sheets collapse, and how do glaciers respond when the climate shifts? Forecasts of future sea level rise and of water supplies from glaciers depend on computer models.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
glaciology
paleoclimate
Cordilleran Ice Sheet
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jun 2027
What they work on
- Date the thinning of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet by measuring 135 beryllium-10 exposure ages along about 15 vertical mountain transects in western Canada, known as the "glacial dipstick" approach.
- Combine the exposure ages with coupled climate–ice sheet model simulations, using Bayesian uncertainty quantification, to produce 3-D reconstructions of how the Cordilleran Ice Sheet collapsed.
- Measure when Holocene glaciers advanced and retreated at six sites from Alaska to Patagonia, using paired carbon-14 and beryllium-10 bedrock exposure ages.
- Reconstruct glacier length through time with a Bayesian-guided Monte Carlo model. Then use a glacier model driven by climate simulations to find climate scenarios that explain why glaciers grew while global temperatures warmed.
More about the research
These models are mostly tuned to present-day conditions. Rocks left exposed as ice retreated record when that happened. Both projects date these rocks and combine the dates with statistical and glacier models. The goal is to reconstruct past ice changes and test the models used for future projections.
Why it matters
Greenland's melting is one of the largest and most uncertain sources of future sea level rise. Testing ice sheet models against a past collapse could make sea level projections more reliable for coastal communities. Understanding how glaciers in the Americas responded to past climate shifts could improve forecasts of the same glaciers. That matters for people who depend on glacier meltwater for drinking, irrigation and energy.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Collaborative Research: NSF/GEO-NERC: The Collapse of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet: Using Glacial Dipsticks to Constrain Ice Sheet Modeling
NSF · Jul 2024 – Jun 2027
Collaborative Research: Reconstructing Holocene glacier lengths through time to address climate model-data disagreements
NSF · Jul 2023 – Jun 2027
Closest labs
Alia Lesnek
CUNY Queens College, NY·Earth & Environmental Science·Early-career
Reconstruct when the Cordilleran Ice Sheet retreated across Southwest Alaska, using geologic mapping and cosmogenic nuclide surface exposure dating, which measures atoms that build up in rock once it is exposed.
Robert DeConto
University of Massachusetts, MA·Earth & Environmental Science
Test whether the northern Greenland Ice Sheet is more sensitive to Arctic warming than the southern ice sheet, by drilling through the ice and measuring cosmogenic nuclides such as beryllium-10 and aluminum-26 in the bedrock below to find past ice-free periods.
Alexander Robel
Georgia Institute of Technology, GA·Earth & Environmental Science·Early-career
Build an open-source software package that applies transient ensemble Kalman filtering, a method that repeatedly corrects many model runs against observations, to a wide range of ice sheet models.
The school
University of Wisconsin-Madison: 91 labs on PI Pages, $1.9B a year on research, 854 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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