The AGU Sverdrup Award Lecture: Glaciers on the loose: navigating the perilous waters of ice sheet-ocean interactions and interdisciplinary science

Collapsing ice shelves and increased iceberg calving reflect the widespread speed up of glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica that, over the last two decades, has tripled the contribution of ice sheets to sea level rise. The rapidity of these changes has come as a surprise, revealing major gaps in our understanding of how ice sheets respond to a changing climate. Recently, increased melting under floating ice shelves and at the edge of marine-terminating glaciers, associated with warming ocean waters, has emerged as the trigger for glacier speed up, making ice sheet-ocean interactions a scientific priority underlying efforts to improve predictions of climate change and sea level rise. This is a challenging task because it requires collaboration across multiple disciplines, developing new technologies, and coupling ice sheet and ocean models. This lecture focuses on advances in our understanding of these changes based on observations at the edge of massive calving glaciers in iceberg-choked fjords in Greenland using helicopters, icebreakers, fishing vessels, and autonomous vehicles. Here, melting is caused by intrusions of warm, subtropical waters into the fjords and enhanced by muddy plumes of surface melt released hundreds of meters below sea level. Progress in this emerging field of glacier/ocean interactions has only been possible thanks to a community-wide effort and exemplifies how the nature and scale of the complex problems facing earth scientists today require an inclusive, collaborative, and interdisciplinary approach that is fundamentally different from the more traditional, competition-based culture in which so many of us are accustomed to working.