Alex Robel
@iceclimate
Ice sheets, climate, math, coasts, community resilience. Associate Professor Georgia Tech EAS. he/him.
Brooklyn is studying how warm and soft basal ice under Store Glacier produces stronger spatial variation due to basal friction
Finally we have Brooklyn Wright, a GT EAS REU researcher from @columbiauniversity.bsky.social (and originally metro ATL!) who is working with @neosha.bsky.social in GT PGSL
Kaelyn is using satellite data to understand how ocean dynamics drive phytoplankton blooms in the Argentina Basin of the South Atlantic
Next up is Kaelyn Young, a GT undergraduate researcher in GT GATO working with @solilyquy.bsky.social
Dani has build a model of Antarctic polynyas coupled through the Coastal Current, showing that ice shelves work like a networked collective producing cascades of tipping points that wouldn’t occur in the absence of the coastal current
Followed by Dani Scoville, a GT EAS REU researcher working with me in GT ICCL, a math major at @tamu.bsky.social
Alex is researching water mass variability across the Antarctic front using ARGO float data
Next up is Alex Gray, a GT EAS REU researcher coming to us from TAMU Corpus Christi Physics, working with @solilyquy.bsky.social in GT GATO group
First up is Leo Liu, and undergraduate CS student from @emoryuniversity.bsky.social working with @donglaiyang.bsky.social from GT PGSL
Today is our 8th annual Summer Undergraduate Research Showcase in GT Polar. Stick around to read about some exciting early career scientists! 🐝 🧊 🐝 🧊
She has now implemented these parameterizations into an ice sheet model and shown that supraglacial lakes can produce 30% more calving-driven loss from Antarctica in future projections. Pre-print coming soon!
Our last Ice-T talk from postdoc Dr. Paul Summers 🥲 where he imparted sage wisdom to students and summarized his very successful two years of work with myself and Becca Jackson at Tufts. He is off to a position @sandialabs.bsky.social!
In short: current Antarctic ice loss rates strongly predict ice loss for the next ~50 years due to the slow response time of the ice sheet
Here’s the key map showing where surface slope breaks, indicative of lower basal friction, are offset from the grounding line. Red indicates upstream displacements of km+ scale
A forthcoming paper will present a new theory and model of the role of bubbles in glacier discharge plumes in driving more than 10x the melting predicted by previous theories (and explaining lab experiments as below and observations on the way)
Presenting our newest PhD from the GT Ice & Climate Group, Dr. Madeline Mamer! 🎉🌊🧊
And that’s it! This was our first time running this field trip and it was a smashing success thanks to a highly engaged group of students and assistance facilitating meetings from our community partners in GA and SC. Here’s the crew all together!
We ended the day and our trip by discussing engineering design and career pathways at JMT, the engineering firm that designed the projects we saw earlier in the day
We also saw a pump station nestled right in a neighborhood and discussed how critical infrastructure can be designed to fit within the urban fabric to increase local buy-in
Next we got to see the Low Battery Seawall, where 100+ year old infrastructure was not only raised but also made into an accessible community amenity along almost a mile of downtown waterfront
Yesterday was the last day of the trip, and an exciting one: we were in Charleston where we started by hearing from the Chief Resilience Officer for the city about the philosophy in designing flood mitigation efforts across municipal departments
It was also a great opportunity for the students (and me!) to meet Jasmine Smith, President of the Pin Point Betterment Association who have been extensively working with the GT CEAR Hub to put community voices first in designing flood mitigation infrastructure
In the afternoon we went to the Pin Point Heritage community to learn about one of the largest remaining Gullah Geechee communities in the Southeast and their historical relationship to the marsh, fisheries and flooding
Day 2 of our spring break field trip: we spent the morning with staff from the City of Savannah discussing how to innovate within municipal governments to adapt to to changing stormwater runoff, land use and urban heat
A very timely piece from @ajc.com related to the current federal pause on funds for beach nourishment programs across the country, I added some words on the important of coastal protections under sea level rise www.ajc.com/news/2026/03...
We saw a living shoreline deployed to armor a 4H summer camp against encroaching erosion in a tidal marsh channel while preserving the natural state of the marsh ecosystem
Russ Clark also of the GT CEAR Hub explained how low cost water level sensors can be deployed over a wide range of locations and be easily relocated when sea levels and barrier island dynamics requires it
Jill Gambill from the GT CEAR Hub showed us a tide gate that was engineered to maintain storm sewer outflow capacity amidst rising sea levels
We also heard from a US Army Corps Engineer about how coastal protections and sediment modeling make it possible to keep this beach healthy and while maintaining the fastest growing commercial shipping channel in the country