Event

The Department of Earth & Environmental Science

University of Pennsylvania

Invites you to attend a EES Seminar Series

Friday, November 15, 2024 - 3:00 PM

"Sea Level Rise, Ice Sheets and Coastal Adaptation:  Fragile, but Still Resilient"

Sea level rise, combined with increased risk from extreme precipitation, hurricanes and other climate disasters, requires that coastal communities urgently adapt to current and future vulnerabilities. The challenge is that many key physical processes that control sea level rise remain poorly understood, leading to a range of sea level rise projections that can confound planning and decision making.

Here we review approaches designed to improve our understanding of the key processes that control the ice sheet contribution to sea level rise and how this information is translated to local communities and decision makers.  We find that a unifying theme for both physical models and community engagement is overcoming the tendency to envision a future that looks very much like the present.  For example, at the ice sheet scale we find that brittle failure of ice—how ice breaks—is often not included in ice sheet models, but has been hypothesized to have led to rapid ice sheet changes in the past  and could lead to large changes under future climate forcing. Similarly, at the community-scale, aging and failing infrastructure, often associated with historic redlining, results in large disparities in current climate risk and these risks are projected to grow as climate change accelerates.  Despite these challenges, we show that scenario planning is one way that allows us to imagine and then projections to better illustrate societally relevant climate futures.    

Dr. Jeremy Bassis

Professor

Department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering

University of Michigan

I'm a professor at the University of Michigan in the department of Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering at the University of Michigan.  My research program focuses on understanding the processes that control the ice sheet contribution to sea level rise, focusing on physical processes like marine ice cliff instability and the influence of climate forcing on ice shelf stability. Recently, my research interests have evolved to include paleo-constraints on sea level rise and community-level climate and coastal resilience.