Carlos Moffat from UD receives the NSF CAREER Award for studying melting ice in Antarctica
UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE
Grant announcement
PICTURE: THE UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE’S CARLOS MOFFAT (LEFT), SUPPORTED PROFESSOR IN THE SCHOOL OF MARINE SCIENCE AND POLITICS IN THE SCHOOL FOR EARTH, OCEAN AND ENVIRONMENT, HAS BEEN AWARDED FOR A FIVE YEAR
As a coastal physical oceanographer, University of Delaware Assistant Professor Carlos Moffat has been interested in how coastal systems affect the greater climate and has for some time been working on projects that will examine the effects of the ocean on glacier retreat around the world measure up.
Moffat has studied coastal systems in some of the world’s most remote regions, such as Patagonia and Antarctica, and observed how the ocean plays a major role in explaining the patterns of continent ice loss that contribute to global sea level rise. As more ice melts on land, the mean sea level rises worldwide.
Now that Moffat has received a five-year National Science Foundation (NSF) early career development award of $ 787,528, Moffat will tackle a challenging scientific problem polar physical oceanographers face: trying to figure out and to understand how all of this adds to freshwater as a result, ice melt affects the coastal systems in Antarctica.
In particular, Moffat will try to find out where freshwater ends up and how it affects the circulation and the properties of the ocean in Antarctica.
This meltwater creates strong coastal currents and ocean fronts, and these currents are affected by winds, tides, and collapses when they become unstable. In addition to creating these currents, the distribution of freshwater in polar oceans strongly modulates the distribution of marine organisms, the extent of ocean mixing, and the formation and melting of sea ice, among other things.
“We know surprisingly little about these processes in polar regions, and the CAREER grant gives me the opportunity to study them,” said Moffat, who works in the School of Marine Science and Policy at UD College for Earth, Ocean and Environment. “We are trying to study a part of the ocean where it is very risky and difficult to collect observations.”
One of the reasons this problem has been so difficult to study is that because the meltwater is lighter, it rises and also accumulates near the coast. These coastal surface regions have been severely affected by various types of ice, including icebergs that break off from glaciers and sea ice that forms in the ocean itself.
To conduct his research, Moffat will go to the western Antarctic Peninsula in January 2022 – the region he is using as a model for the study. Moffat said he chose the western Antarctic Peninsula because it is a region of the world that warmed quickly in the 20th century and it was one of the fastest warming regions in the southern hemisphere.
As soon as he arrives at his place of study, he will use some instruments to study the freshwater release from the coast. He hopes to use observations connected to the atmosphere and the ocean, as well as autonomous vehicles, for his research.
“There are autonomous vehicles that you can drop from a ship or one of the Antarctic bases in this region and program with an observation-gathering mission,” Moffat said. “The idea is that next summer we will program two of these vehicles for a fairly wide coastal area and collect oceanographic data like salinity, temperature and some microstructure data to understand the mixing processes. ”
In the meantime, he will start modeling the region at UD.
Moffat said he was interested in this problem because it is a good example of how processes that occur near the coast and in relatively small places – sometimes even under ice sheets and small glaciers themselves – have a major impact on the global climate system .
“To understand sea level rise, it is critical to understand the process of what is happening at this point of contact between the ice and the ocean and the processes that explain how quickly the ice is melting at that boundary,” said Moffat. “This oceanic melting process is an important source of uncertainty in predicting sea-level rise.”
Educational component
In addition to his research, Moffat hopes the grant will help achieve several educational goals. The first goal is to create a new class that will focus on polar oceans and polar problems.
Another key effort of the proposal is to set up a professional learning institute that recruits grades 8-12 teachers for university education for two consecutive summers. Over the course of a few days, Moffat and his colleagues will translate some of the research from Antarctica into material that can be used in the teacher’s respective classrooms, particularly in light of the next generation scientific standards for Delaware.
In addition, Moffat will use what he learned in Antarctica to train a PhD student and present his research results at various public relations conferences and events.
Finally, the School of Marine Science and Policy at UD was involved in efforts to renovate Robinson Hall’s basement to create a new teaching laboratory, and Moffat said he would join in on that effort.
“The idea is to use these new facilities to create student exams where we can use tanks and other teaching aids to get hands-on experience with problems related to physical oceanography,” Moffat said.
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