Alex Robel

The Miami Herald tracked 16,569 flood complaints from over 12,000 locations in Miami-Dade and Broward over the last 11 years, and found 32% were outside the newly-expanded 500-year flood zones scheduled to go into effect as early as 2026: www.miamiherald.com/news/local/e...

Paper here: doi.org/10.1103/1plj...

Really interesting new paper showing ice "sliding mechanically destroys the ordered crystal lattice of ice, creating an amorphous layer that thickens as the sliding goes on". Maybe this explains some things related to subtemperate sliding?

Why Is Ice Slippery? A New Hypothesis Slides Into the Chat. | Quanta Magazine A newly proposed explanation for the slipperiness of ice has revived a centuries-long debate.

Will be taking some personal time to process scientists not really knowing why ice is slippery. Please respect my privacy unless see me sprawled out on an icy sidewalk yelling, "No one knows why this happened to me!"

www.quantamagazine.org/why-is-ice-s...

GT polar group photo

Icegiving food!

The table setting

The GT Polar crew for Icegiving 2025! A great potluck spread and a great time with members old and new.

Sinking skyscrapers? As buildings got bigger in Sunny Isles, so did engineering concerns At least a handful of towers have sunk as much as two to three times more than expected, the Miami Herald found in a months-long analysis of dozens of engineering reports covering nearly every buildin...

www.miamiherald.com/news/local/e...

Boiling Mud and Frozen Flows: How Mars’ Atmosphere Shapes Its Sedimentary Landscapes

Boiling mud & Frozen Flows! Write up from GT on our new paper: cos.gatech.edu/news/boiling...

Paper here: www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Huge fractures opening at the Thwaites Glacier Eastern Ice Shelf grounding line

Influence of water extraction on subglacial hydrology and glacier velocity Abstract. Subglacial water modulates glacier velocity across a wide range of space and time scales by influencing friction at the glacier bed. Observations show ice acceleration due to supraglacial la...

Interesting new preprint from @colinrmeyer.bsky.social and colleagues -> “we perform transient model experiment…to determine the effects of water extraction on glacier velocity. With continuous pumping, we simulate a modest impact on velocity…”

egusphere.copernicus.org/preprints/20...

Zillow Removes Climate Risk Scores From Home Listings

“…8,150 properties that were listed as being at high risk of flooding […] reduced their total sales prices by about 1 percent of their value”
www.nytimes.com/2025/11/30/c...

Contrasting melt regime in the Ice Grounding Zone of Thwaites Glacier, West Antarctica | PNAS The contribution of Thwaites Glacier, Antarctica, to sea level rise is influenced by how quickly warm salty seawater of Circumpolar Deep Water orig...

“We have observational evidence and ocean modeling results to document that kilometer-scale seawater intrusions beneath grounded ice generate a high melt in the [grounding zone of Thwaites Glacier].”

www.pnas.org/doi/full/10....

Community Spotlight - Ali Sarhadi

👋 Meet Assistant Professor @asarhadi.bsky.social.
Sarhadi's research focuses on a growing threat: hurricanes fueled by a warming climate. He uses physics-based computational modeling to understand and mitigate hurricane risk in the age of climate change. Learn more⤵️

Ocean submesoscales as drivers of submarine melting within Antarctic ice cavities - Nature Geoscience Submesoscale ocean features deliver heat beneath Thwaites Ice Shelf and contribute to submarine melting, according to numerical modelling combined with available observations.

“…submesoscales account for one-fifth of the total submarine melt variance in the area and highlight a positive feedback loop between submesoscale motions and submarine melting.”

doi.org/10.1038/s415...

The #ISMIP7 ice-ocean Antarctic focus group is recruiting a 2.5 year postdoc on ice-shelf basal melting at Northumbria University, Newcastle, UK. A great way to develop international collaborations and contribute to the improvement of sea level projections!

work4.northumbria.ac.uk#en/sites/CX_...

New paper alert ! 🙂
Happy to share our new study published in The Cryosphere !
doi.org/10.5194/tc-1...
We modelled the evolution of the Greenland Ice Sheet from the LGM (24 ka) to the present and learned a lot on its former history and dynamics !
@jeremyely.bsky.social @chrisdclark.bsky.social

Excited to be visiting LDEO for the first time in a decade!

Winnie Chu Awarded NSF CAREER Grant to Create First-Ever Map of Antarctic Ice Sheet Base Temperatures

Congratulations to @winnie-polargeo.bsky.social for earning an NSF CAREER grant to map temperatures at the base of the Antarctic ice sheet — the first project of its kind.

This research will refine climate models and help predict future melt, protecting coastal communities.

b.gatech.edu/3LyaveA

6,000,000 year old ice & plenty of wind and cold! What folks go through for old ice.

Team is headed back to Allan Hills now, follow more at COLDEX.org

Support via the incredible National Science Foundation and US Antarctic Program.

PNAS 6Myr results: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Sub-grid parameterization of iceberg drag in a coupled iceberg–ocean model Abstract. Ocean conditions in fjords play a key role in the accelerating ice mass loss of Greenland's marine-terminating glaciers. Ice mélange and icebergs have been shown to impact fjord circulation,...

A new and improved parameterization of the subgrid-scale effects of icebergs will enable realistic simulations of the future of the ocean around ice sheets. Led by postdoc Paul Summers and in collab with Rebecca Jackson, as part of the GLACIOME project! tc.copernicus.org/articles/19/...

Ocean warming threatens the viability of 60% of Antarctic ice shelves - Nature The viability of Antarctic ice shelves under low rates and high rates of global warming is modelled to estimate when it will become unfeasible for the ice shelves to maintain their present-day shape.

🌊🧊🇦🇶
I am happy and proud to present our #platformist team effort out in @nature.com!
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
We examine if, when, and why #Antarctic #ice shelves will no longer be viable, at the latest, due to changes in #atmosphere and #ocean conditions.
A little 🧵 for the experts...
1/7

PNAS: Six-million-year-old ice discovered in Antarctica offers unprecedented window into a warmer Earth via our NSF COLDEX & US Antarctic Program. ❄️ www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

@dgrau13.bsky.social

A great explainer on @dgrau13.bsky.social’s recent paper finding simple equations describing the size of melt lakes on ice sheets doi.org/10.1038/s414...

Career update: I’m excited & honored to be @igsoc.bsky.social's new Secretary General! I’m particularly excited to return to my roots as a glaciologist in this community-facing role. As I’m getting up to speed, feel free to reach out & see you at IGS meetings and publishing in IGS journals soon?!

Melting Cylinders of Ice Reveal an Iceberg’s Tipping Point - Eos New lab experiments on cylinders of pure ice shed light on how icebergs flip over as they melt, demonstrating the link between a warming ocean and small-scale events that can have rippling consequence...

Icebergs are big. Researchers made mini versions in a lab to better understand what moves them.

eos.org/articles/mel...

Microclimate governs the morphology of sediment flows on Mars - Communications Earth & Environment Gravitational flow deposits on Earth may not be meaningful analogues for those on Mars or other planetary bodies according to laboratory experiments conducted at Mars-like temperatures and pressures w...

New paper drop led by former postdoc Jacob Adler now at ASU. www.nature.com/articles/s43...

Pressure, temperature, & composition affect the transport and morphology of sedimentary flows on Mars - in space and time!

☠️ beware of using earth analogs to interpret Hesperian and Amazonian deposits☠️

A great piece on work being done around flood prediction and resilience at GT making the connection with fundamental glacier physics 🌊🐝

How Soon Will the Seas Rise? | Quanta Magazine The uniquely vulnerable West Antarctic Ice Sheet holds enough water to raise global sea levels by 5 meters. But when that will happen — and how fast — is anything but settled.

I was interviewed for this great piece about sea level rise.
Solid reporting here on the scientific controversy, but I like that Evan ended with my bigger picture quote that a lot of the controversy doesn't really matter because by 2100, we will be talking about a radically different coastline.

Damage development on Antarctic ice shelves sensitive to climate warming - Nature Climate Change Damages such as crevasses or cracks can be early indicators of ice shelf weakening. Here, the authors quantify changes in damage structures in Antarctic ice sheets, which show sensitivity to warming

🚨 New paper alert!

Research by postdoc Maaike Izeboud from the bglacier group in Nature Climate Change 🎉

Using 20 years of satellite data, she mapped Antarctic ice shelf fractures and showed how damage rises under high emissions but stabilises in low-emission futures
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

We have a new paper out! Work with @leighstearns.bsky.social, @laserglaciers.bsky.social, and Sid Shankar studying the potential of new ICEYE SAR satellite imagery to study the dynamic behaviour of ice mélange around the margins of the Greenland Ice Sheet.

Read more here: tinyurl.com/mtc94juu