Jan Swierczek-Jereczek
I study the stability of ice sheets in the past, present and future, focusing on their interaction with the solid Earth and the sea level. To this end, I use and develop numerical models of ice-sheet evolution and glacial isostatic adjustment.
Session
The Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets have experienced significant volume loss over the last decades, with a contribution of 0.1 m to sea-level rise that is bound to become significantly larger over the coming millennia. Under high-emission scenarios, they could contribute by as much as 18 mSLE by the year 3000, with dramatic consequences for coastal livelihood. Ice-sheet models are the central tool to produce such projections but generally present many limitations: they are not easily extensible by the user, they are difficult to couple to other Earth System model components, they lack interactivity and easy visualisation, they are sparsely documented, and they are often incompatible with modern software and hardware advancements, like automatic differentiation and GPU computing. To address this, we develop Pagos.jl, a continental ice-sheet model written in Julia that follows the philosophy paved by Oceananigans.jl and SpeedyWeather.jl: running simulations should be as easy and fun as playing Lego. Besides reducing the time to first plot compared to traditional models, this also offers a privileged framework to develop and test new physics and parameterisations. The user-friendliness of Pagos.jl allows a simple coupling to other Earth System model components and goes hand in hand with its computational efficiency. This allows the user to run simulations at the continental scale with resolutions of a few kilometres and address important scientific questions around grounding-line dynamics.