Ada Loewen successfully defended her PhD thesis "Understanding fracture in confined landfast sea ice by integrating observations and Inuit Knowledge: A case study from Admiralty Inlet, Nunavut"! Congratulations on a unique and thorough study that spans approaches from Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar remote sensing to Inuit Knowledge and brings them together to learn about when, [...]
Congratulations to Ada Loewen, winner of this year's Tertia M.C. Hughes Graduate Student Prize from the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS). Ada was selected by the awards committee for two contributions of special merit: her impactful community-engaged oceanographic research in Nunavut and her exceptional service to CMOS.
Congratulations to PhD candidate Ada Loewen who just published a study in Canadian Journal of Remote Sensing that identified over 4000 fractures in the landfast sea ice of Admiralty Inlet. This paper describes a method that connects remotely sensed data (interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR), optical imagery), Inuit Knowledge, and in-situ observations to identify fractures [...]
We are seeking a PhD student with strong quantitative skills for an Arctic glacio-hydrology research project in the Water and Ice Research Laboratory (WIRL), Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. The project will build on WIRL’s long-term Milne Fiord research program on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian high Arctic, and will [...]
A new paper that examines the role of the 'footloose' calving mechanism in ice islands was just published in the Journal of Glaciology. Jesse Smith, compared observed ice island calving events from the Canadian Ice Island Drift, Deterioration and Detection (CI2D3) Database with predictions from a finite element model created by Mahmud Sazidy. Simulated rams [...]
A Colorado University Boulder–led study, published recently in Nature Geoscience, investigates the retreat of Antarctica’s Hektoria Glacier and highlights the role of the ice plain bed geometry in this process. In 2023, the glacier retreated at an unprecedented rate, losing a total of 8 kilometres of ice in just two months. Yulia Antropova, a PhD [...]
It has been a while since we posted on social media. It didn't really seem like that much fun anymore as Twitter morphed into X. But now the WIRL site is sharing posts with Bluesky - you can find us here: https://bsky.app/profile/wirlcarleton.bsky.social The twitter feed that we posted to previously has been copied in. Sorry [...]
New research has unlocked some of the mysteries surrounding the basal channel under the Milne Ice Shelf that discharges fresh water from the Milne Fiord epishelf lake to the Arctic Ocean. The analysis titled "Momentum, Heat, and Salt Budgets to Estimate Drag and Transfer Coefficients inside an Ice Shelf Basal Channel" was led by Jérémie [...]
Ever wonder how fast the Milne Ice Shelf or Milne Glacier or its ice tongue will melt after major calving events or under various warming scenarios? The answers to these questions and more are in Jérémie Bonneau's new paper in The Cryosphere. Check it out here!
A study, led by Abby Dalton at the Laboratory for Cryopsheric Research at the University of Ottawa examines the drift of iceberg tracks in Nares Strait and Baffin Bay. The study is the first to use a novel Iceberg Beacon Track Database and relies on the Cryologger Ice Tracking Beacon both developed at WIRL. For [...]
