CPOM Staff based at UCL
Sophie Nowicki
| email: smn |
tel: 0207.679.7871
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| fax: 0207.679.7883 |
Sophie Nowicki is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at CPOM. Her research interest include mathematical and numerical modeling of glaciological processes. Her work so far has focused on investigating the behavior of marine ice sheets, a matter that has lain at the heart of Antarctic glaciology for 30 years.
In a 1974 theoretical paper, Weertman suggested that a marine ice sheet (i.e. an ice sheet that terminates by floatation) whose bed gets deeper into the interior, is unstable and that were, for some reason, the ice sheet to start to thin, the thinning would continue until the sheet ceased to exist. This theoretical argument has motivated a great deal of Antarctic glaciological research in the past three decades, because the configuration of the West Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS), which contains a water volume equivalent of 5 metres of sea level, has such a bed configuration. To large extent, however, this research has been inconclusive, not the least because it has proved very difficult to even determine if in fact the WAIS is thinning. Recently, however, satellite observations have shown that thinning extending well into the interior is occurring in the Pine Island and Thwaites Glacier Basins of the West Antarctic ice sheet. These observations give the now old contention that a marine ice sheet may be unstable a new importance: these two glaciers account of 16% of the mass flux from the WAIS.
In fact, a close examination shows that the result of Weetman's theory rests on an assumption concerning the force balance in the region of the grounding line (the locus of points of flotation). This assumption is plausible, but not proven, because to do so requires a solution of the full Stokes problem in the vicinity of the grounding line, a problem which has proven remarkably resistant to analytic methods. On the other hand, a numerical solution requires a fluid dynamical code of high quality (because the solution has singular aspects) and one that can deal with free surface and buoyancy forces. This led Sophie to develop a free surface, finite element, full Stokes model during her Ph.D.
Sophie obtained a B.Sc in Geophysics in 2001 and a M.Sc with distinction in Remote Sensing and Image Processing in 2002, both from the University of Edinburgh. Sophie was awarded a Ph.D. in Theoretical Glaciology from University College London in 2007 for a thesis entitled 'Modelling the Transition Zone of Marine Ice Sheets'.