Welcome!
We are an interdisciplinary group of geophysicists, glaciologists, mechanicians, and geodesists, led by Brent Minchew, who study the interactions between the climate, the cryosphere, and the solid earth. We use a combination of geodetic observations—primarily interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR)—and physical models to study dynamical systems and their various responses to environmental forcing. Most of our research focuses on the dynamics of glaciers, with an emphasis on the mechanics of glacier beds, fracture mechanics in glacier ice, ice rheology, and ice-ocean interactions. By modulating ice flow and directly influencing glacier erosion rates, these factors play critical roles in glacier and ice sheet evolution, the dynamic response of glaciers to climate change, and the impact of glaciers on landform evolution and the global carbon cycle over human to geological timescales. We take a natural-laboratory approach to science and prefer to focus on observable short-timescale (hourly to sub-decadal) variations in the dynamics of large-scale systems in response to known forcings. Our ultimate goal is to establish clear connections between observations and first principles. Read more.