Event

The Department of Earth & Environmental Science

University of Pennsylvania

Invites you to attend a EES Seminar Series

Friday, January 24, 2025 - 3:00 PM

"Bridging Pore and Grain-Scale Physics to the Changing Cryosphere"

The Greenland Ice Sheet has become the largest single source of barystatic sea-level rise in the cryosphere. Numerical models are the best tools to make projections of the future of the ice sheet. However, predicting how fast the ice sheet flows, and when does calving occur at glacier margins has proven to be challenging, primarily because of (1) the limited knowledge of the fate of meltwater in the hydrologic system and (2) the poor representation of ice-ocean interactions. In this talk, I will showcase the development of two process-based models for englacial hydrology and ice-ocean interactions, through interdisciplinary lens of porous media flows, granular mechanics, and remote sensing observations. Our poromechanical model reveals that surface-to-bed hydrofracture will not occur in ice slab regions until all pore space proximal to the initial flaw has been filled with solid ice. Our discrete element model quantifies the seasonal mélange buttressing force that coincides with observed calving dynamics.

Dr. Olivia Meng

Assistant Professor

Department of Civil Engineering

Purdue University 

Yue (Olivia) Meng is an assistant professor at Department of Civil Engineering at Purdue University. Prior to joining Purdue, she was a postdoctoral scholar at Princeton and Stanford Universities. She obtained her Ph.D. degree in Civil and Environmental Engineering at MIT in 2022. Her Ph.D. work focused on understanding interactions between multiphase flow and granular mechanics for carbon sequestration. During her postdoc, she develops process-based models for calving at tidewater glaciers. She is broadly interested in soft earth geophysics with a current focus of ice-ocean interactions.