Ice-ocean interaction

The great continental ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland terminate at the ocean along much of their margins. The floating extensions of ice sheets, called ice shelves, interact directly with the ocean. The warming of the oceans and changes to ocean circulation have been a reason suggested for the recent pattern of increased ice loss from parts of West Antarctica.

I have been particularly interested in a particular aspect of this problem: subglacial plumes. These are turbulent plumes of relatively fresh water underneath ice shelves fed by glacial discharge and ice melting. However, as a plume rises buoyantly, its pressure decreases, so it can become supercooled, that is fall beneath its freezing temperature. This causes a dramatic mode of ice growth, called frazil.

My interest in frazil ice started when I was a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Physics at the University of Oxford in the group of Prof. Andrew Wells. We studied

• The growth rate of frazil ice crystals (Rees Jones and Wells, 2015)
• Frazil-ice dynamics and ocean mixed layers and sub-ice-shelf plumes (Rees Jones and Wells, 2018