Dr Benjamin Davison from the School of Geography and Planning will investigate ice-ocean interactions in Greenland during his prestigious UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship.
Fjords are long, narrow conduits that connect the open ocean to the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS). They control the transfer of relatively warm ocean waters to the ice sheet margin, which is driving ice sheet retreat and sea level rise. In the other direction, fjords control the export of freshwater (in the form of icebergs and meltwater) from the ice sheet to the North Atlantic, which ultimately affects ocean circulation and climate.
The fjords and nearby coastal waters host fisheries, which are sustained by nutrients from the ice sheet and are extremely important to Greenland’s economy. Therefore, understanding fjords is critical to understand the past behaviour of the GrIS, project future sea level rise, sustain socially and economically important fisheries, and project future ocean circulation and climate changes.
However, fjords and the icebergs which travel through them remain too poorly understood to account for them in current projections of sea level rise and climate. Icebergs release huge volumes of freshwater and nutrients as they drift away from the ice sheet. Counter-intuitively, this can increase the amount of warm water reaching the ice sheet, as well as slow key ocean currents and boost fishery productivity.
As a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow, Dr Benjamin Davison will conduct an ambitious programme of multi-disciplinary work to enhance our understanding of fjords and improve projections of ice sheet-ocean interactions. This will involve measuring and monitoring icebergs around Greenland using a constellation of satellites in combination with detailed computer modelling of Greenland’s fjords.
These observations and simulations will provide the understanding required to improve projections of sea level rise and climate change, improve the management of Greenland’s fisheries and reduce hazards posed by icebergs to Arctic maritime operations.
Dr Davison said: “My ambitious, interdisciplinary research agenda will require a sustained, long-term research effort only possible through this Fellowship’s unique support and scale. It will allow me to build a research group at the University of Sheffield that is dedicated to improving our understanding of Greenland’s fjords and using that information to minimise the human and economic impacts of a warming Arctic.”