GEODYnamics and Climate science
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Welcome !I am a professor in the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department at McGill University and a Canada Research Chair in Ice Sheet - Sea Level Interactions. I did my PhD at Harvard University in Earth and Planetary Sciences, and post doctoral work at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Science at NYU. My research group and I work at the intersection between solid Earth geophysics and climate science. Our research centres around the interactions between ice sheets, sea level and the solid Earth, and the response of these systems to past, present and future climate changes. I am also a member of the McGill Space Institute.
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Contact InformationNatalya Gomez
Earth and Planetary Sciences McGill University FDA 316 Email: natalya.gomez@mcgill.ca Twitter: @NatalyaGomezEPS |
News
January 2021
After a much needed break to recover from all the challenges of 2020, a new semester begins. While it is not the easiest time of the year for Montreal, with a strict curfew in place and all but non-essential services and schools closed due to covid-19 in the thick of winter, the group is staying well and keeping up with each other and continuing to help each other learn in group meetings and Slack interactions.
This semester, I am teaching perhaps my favourite course, EPSC510 Geodynamics! I have a great group of students from a range of programs at McGill, from geology, physics, planetary science to atmosphere ocean sciences, and I find it exciting to show students how geodynamics of the solid Earth is relevant to all of these areas of research. We are making it all work online so far, with lots of breakout discussions, in-class hands-on activities and interactive lectures with well-timed cat sighting interruptions. Inspired by Black History Month coming up next month, I've also begun playing a song by a Black or Indigenous artist and sharing a bit about the artist every week during lecture breaks. So far we have heard Sam Cooke, Ella Fitzgerald and Koko Taylor.
December 2020
Students in Earth Systems Applications (ESYS500) - the capstone course of McGill's Earth Systems Science program - presented the research projects they have been working on all semester. The theme that we picked this year was "The Impact of Covid-19 on the Earth System", and groups chose to look at a variety of things from there, from carbon emissions to aerosols to meat production. They found and analyzed data, built numerical models and delved extensively into the literature as well. I love teaching this course because it makes me reflect on what doing research is all about, I get to see through students eyes as they discover the research process, often for the first time, and I also get to learn from them as they become the experts in their research topics over the course of the semester.
Our research group finished off the semester by attending virtual AGU. Julia Morales-Aguire presented her work on glacial earthquakes in Greenland, Jeannette Wan gave a talk on the impact of spatial resolution in numerical models of Earth deformation and sea level change near ice sheet grounding lines in the West Antarctic, Maryam Yousefi presented her PhD work on geodynamics and sea level change along the North American West Coast, and Dave Purnell presented his latest paper, with Willam Minarik, David Porter and I in public review with ESurfD, on a new technique of making precise water level measurements using low-cost GNSS antenna arrays. I also presented on my latest paper in Nature, "Antarctic ice dynamics amplified by Northern Hemisphere sea level forcing".
November 2020
The World Climate Research Programm (WCRP) Grand Challenges Committee on Regional Sea Level and Coastal Impacts met online with members joining from all over the world to discuss future plans, especially focussing on bringing the gaps between sea level scientists, policy makers and coastal planners, and on planning the next international sea level conference in 2022. The work package on long term sea level and glacial isostatic adjustment that I lead with Tom James, Mark Tamisiea and Roderik van de Wal presented recent research highlights in our field revealing what studying how ice sheets and sea levels have evolved in Earth's history can help us to better interpret modern records of current changes and inform future projections in a warming climate.
October 2020
A paper led by MSc student Anna Hayden with Sophie Wilmes, Mattias Greene, Linda Pan, Holly Han and Nick Golledge has now been published on the "Multi-century impacts of ice sheet retreat on sea levels and ocean tides in Hudson Bay". This study brought together sea level, ice sheet and ocean tide modelers to understand future sea level and ocean tide changes in Northern Canada. Hudson Bay is a shallow bay in northern Canada surrounded by coastal communities and ecosystems that are vulnerable to future sea level change. The bay was ice covered 21,000 years ago, and sea level is currently falling there due to ongoing land uplift since the ice retreated. It is unclear if this trend will continue as the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets melt, contributing to spatially variable sea level changes. Sea level changes will also impact ocean tides due to their sensitivity to water depth. We model future sea level and tide changes in the Hudson Bay region associated with land uplift and projections of Greenland and Antarctic ice loss over the next 500 years. We find that both the sign and the magnitude of the sea level change and associated response of ocean tides in the coming centuries remain in the balance, depending on how the Antarctic ice sheet on the South Pole responds to future climate warming.
Hayden, A.‐M., Wilmes, S.‐B., Gomez, N., Green, J. A. M., Pan, L., Han, H., & Golledge, N. R. (2020). Multi‐century impacts of ice sheet retreat on sea level and ocean tides in Hudson Bay. Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, 125, e2019JC015104. https://doi.org/10.1029/2019JC015104
I also had the pleasure of convening a session on "Sea level and ice-sheet changes, glacial isostatic adjustment, and landscape evolution" with Jessica Creveling and Vivi Pedersen at the Geological Society of America online meeting this month. We were grateful to have such engaging speakers and poster presenters join us on the adventure of navigating the world of online science conferencing together.
September 2020
PALSEA, a working group focussed on understanding responses of ice sheets and sea levels to past climate changes hosted its first Express Virtual meeting. My whole research group attended and I gave an invited talk on my work exploring the role of Northern Hemisphere ice cover changes on Antarctic Ice Sheet Dynamics over the last glacial cycle. It was so motivating to sea colleagues again and hear about exciting new sea level research. One major advantage of the virtual environment is that it made the meeting accessible to many more researchers, students especially, based all over the world.
August 2020
This month, I finally submitted my application package to McGill to apply for tenure! It felt like such a big milestone to put together and submit a summary of all I've done since I started as an assistant professor 5 years ago. It is not often that we take the time to take a step back and take stalk of what we have done, and I couldn't help but feel proud of the research, teaching and service work I have contributed as a faculty member at McGill. From building and funding an exciting and impactful research program, to training a productive research group of exceptionally recognized junior scientists who have continued on to positions in academia and industry, to educating hundreds of students about the Earth and climate systems, and dedicating service to help my communities at McGill and internationally to grow and thrive, there is much to feel good about. It was particularly nice to look back on all these moments from my home office where I have been missing seeing my students and colleagues so much during the pandemic.
July 2020
PhD student Dave Purnell has been awarded a 2020 Paros Scholarship in Geophysical Instrumentation from the American Geophysical Union (AGU). Paros scholarships recognize outstanding graduate students demonstrating interest in geophysical instrumentation and precision field measurements. He will receive the award at this year's AGU Fall Meeting in December.
Dave's paper on "Quantifying the Uncertainty in Ground-Based GNSS-Reflectometry Sea Level Measurements" with coauthors Erik Chan (a former post doc in our group), Joakim Strandberg, David Holland, Thomas Hobiger and I has just become available for early access on the IEEE JSTARS (Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing) website. GNSS-Reflectometry is a newly emerging technique to measure water level changes that involves using a GNSS station (Global Navigation Satellite System, e.g. GPS is a type of GNSS) to track sea level by analyzing the satellite signals collected by the GNSS that reflect off the surface of the water first. This study develops a method for quantifying the precision of these measurements and the sources of uncertainty, and includes an open-access code repository with functions for obtaining, analyzing and estimating the precision of GNSS-Reflectometry observations available on Github here.
Purnell, D.J., Gomez, N., Chan, N.H., Strandberg, J., Holland, D.H. and Hobiger, T. (2020). Quantifying the uncertainty in ground-based GNSS-Reflectometry sea level measurements. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing (JSTARS) doi: 10.1109/JSTARS.2020.3010413.
April 2020
It is a strange feeling to read over previous month's updates below, as Covid-19 has changed how we do just about everything in such a short time. On March 14th McGill University shut down and began distance learning. My team and I are staying at home to help flatten the curve and slow the spread of Covid-19. Some of my students went back to stay with their families in countries across the globe, others are closer. Despite the different time zones and the lack of face to face contact we are still carrying on with our research as each of our situations permits, and putting our wellbeing first. Some of our field projects on the St. Lawrence River and in Greenland have had to be postponed, but we will be back out there eventually and we have plenty of research to work on in the meantime. As a team we continue to meet regularly on Zoom and use Slack to discuss our research and support each other. We are all healthy and will continue to work at a distance until it is safe to meet again. Please stay healthy and keep washing those hands!
March 2020
My partner and I are getting ready to leave for Château Mont Sainte-Anne near Québec City to enjoy a weekend in the snow before I attend the Annual Scientific Meeting of Québec Océan where I will give a keynote talk about ice sheets, sea level change and glacial isostatic adjustment. I am looking forward to getting to know the community of researchers studying a range of topics connected to ocean science in Québec.
January 2020
Hello and Happy New Year!
I started off the new year with a visit to Leeds University for the kick off meeting of the ERC's RISeR project lead by Natasha Barlow investigating the rates, magnitude and spatial patterns of sea level change during the Last Interglacial. I also had a chance to visit with Lauren Gregoire and Ruza Ivanovic and their research groups, and attend the Quaternary Research Association's Annual Discussion Meeting where I gave a keynote talk.
December 2019
We went to the AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco this month, where I co-chaired a session on “Investigating the Feedbacks between Solid Earth Properties and the Cryosphere” and Holly Han presented her research on the influence of solid Earth deformation and sea level change on the evolution of Northern Hemisphere ice sheets over the last glacial cycle. As this year's Cryosphere Early Career award winner I also had the pleasure of giving a talk in the John F. Nye Lecture and Honored Member Presentations session, alongside AGU Fellows Cecilia Bitz and Dorothy Hall, and Nye Lecturer Helen Fricker.
I am now about to head off to Toronto to see my family and take a well-deserved break. Wishing you all a joyful holiday!
November 2019
On Tuesday Nov. 19th at 12:30pm I will be giving a Geotop seminar at UQAM. I am looking forward to this opportunity to share my group's research with a group of Montreal's geoscience students and researchers.
October 2019
This semester, with Jeff McKenzie, I am teaching the capstone course of McGill's Earth System Science program, ESYS500. In this course, the students work collaboratively on a research project, going through the whole process from coming up with a research topic, reviewing literature, developing a hypothesis, finding data, and doing data analysis and modeling to come up with results that they present to members of the Earth Systems Science community at the end of the semester. This year, with help from McGill's Writing Center, I introduced a new component to the course. Students have been blogging about their experiences with the research process and their results as they go along. Their blog is now live and you can follow their progress here:
Earth Systems Science Research in the St Lawrence River Basin Blog
I also had the fantastic experience of being a storyteller at and event where Confabulation teamed up with Broad Science to get a diverse group of scientists to share true, personal stories about their lives and work. I told a story about my childhood imagination, camping and climate change. It was such a good learning experience to put it together, and a vulnerable but positive experience to get up there and share it.
September 2019
September was such an exciting month!
I was honoured to be invited to attend and speak at my first International Paleooceanography Conference (ICP), this year south of the equator for the first time in Sydney Australia. I loved the format of this meeting, with single session talks with all attendees together, followed by a long lunch and poster session with plenty of time for engaging discussion. I met many new people from around the world and discussed some promising research collaborations.
Later in the month, I went to Ottawa for a meeting on Glacial Isostatic Adjustment, Ice Sheets and Sea Level Change that I co-organized with Tom James, Glenn Milne, Pippa Whitehouse and Matt King. We were very happy with how the meeting went and grateful to all of our presenters for giving such engaging talks and posters and highlighting the diverse range of cutting-edge research in this interdisciplinary field.
And finally, to finish off the month, I returned to Montreal for one day to attend the Climate March with 500,000 others (that's more than 1/4 of the population of Montreal!), and then went to join the Advanced Climate Dynamics Courses (ACDC) Summer School on The Anthropocene as a lecturer.
August 2019
I am delighted and deeply honoured to have been given this year's AGU Cryosphere Early Career Award! The award is given to an 'outstanding junior scientist within 10 years of their Ph.D. for a significant contribution to cryospheric science and technology', and generously sponsored by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). The award will be presented at the American Geophysical Union's Fall Meeting in December and I will also have the opportunity to give a talk about my research there on Tuesday December 10 at 13:40 in Moscone West 2022-2024 before the Nye Lecture.
July 2019
Lots of news this month!
I have been nominated vice-chair of the International Association of Geodesy (IAG)'s subsection on Cryospheric Deformation with Jeff Freymueller as chair. I look forward to helping to forward research and facilitate collaborations and scientific discussions in this area.
Another reminder, as the abstract deadline fast approaches, that I am co-convening AGU Fall Meeting session C022 “Investigating the Feedbacks between Solid Earth Properties and the Cryosphere” with Samantha Hansen, Ricarda Dziadek and Aurélien Mordret. Abstracts can be submitted here: https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm19/prelim.cgi/Session/74693
PhD student Holly Han and I are currently at the Quaternary Research meeting INQUA in Dublin Ireland. I gave an invited talk in a great session on paleo-ice sheet model-data interactions (thank you to chairs Jeremy Ely and Lauren Gregoire), and Holly spoke about her work on coupled ice sheet - sea level modeling in the Northern Hemisphere. We have seen a lot of exciting new data and modeling on past climate, sea level and ice sheets here!
PhD students Dave Purnell and Holly Han both gave talks on their work at the IUGG General Assembly in Montreal, and I gave an invited talk on in an interesting interdisciplinary session on Geodesy for Atmospheric and Hydrospheric Climate Research. It was a great meeting and we enjoyed having colleagues from all over the world in our home city.
June 2019
I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at the Women in Physics Canada conference held at McGill University in Montreal this June. I learned a lot about physics as well as equity, diversity and inclusion in academia attending the conference, and it was an honour to have the opportunity to engage with and speak to the next generation of physicists. The organizers did a fantastic job with this conference.
I am looking forward to co-convening AGU Fall Meeting session C022 “Investigating the Feedbacks between Solid Earth Properties and the Cryosphere” with Samantha Hansen, Ricarda Dziadek and Aurélien Mordret. Abstracts can be submitted here:
https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm19/prelim.cgi/Session/74693 and the deadline is July 31, 2019. Hope to see you in San Francisco!
May 2019
I am giving two public outreach talks this month about melting ice and sea level change in a warming climate. One is part of AstroMcGill's public lecture series on May 16th at 7pm on McGill campus, and the other is on Tuesday May 21st at McClean's Pub as part of a Science of Climate Change night at the Pint of Science Festival.
April 2019
Sea level change is a highly interdisciplinary field, and inconsistent understanding of related terminology and concepts across disciplines often gets in the way of progress. "Concepts and Terminology for Sea Level: Mean, Variability and Change, Both Local and Global" lead by Jonathan Gregory that I was involved in along with many others aims to get us all on the same page. https://rdcu.be/bzzjX
I am currently enjoying visiting the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences at Caltech. It has been a pleasure to give a seminar and meet with such an engaging group of scientists. Later this week I travel to the University of Texas at Austin to give a seminar in the Jackson School of Geoscience - I am looking forward to connecting with colleagues there and meeting the department. I have been thinking about ways to cut back on my air travel recently, so I am happy to have been able to combine these two visits.
March 2019
I attended the ACDC 10 year anniversary alumni conference in Rodane, Norway. I attended an ACDC school on ice-ocean interactions as a graduate student in 2010, and the connections I made there have had a very positive impact on my career and research. Last year, I was delighted to join the organizing team and attend ACDC again as a lecturer this time. At the anniversary conference, it was remarkable to meet the wide range of climate scientists who had attended ACDC as students, and hear about how their research has unfolded since. I left feeling inspired about where our field is going, both in terms of research and community. I am looking forward to lecturing at the next ACDC on the Anthropocene in Yosemite National Park in September.
February 2019
Our new paper "Global consequences of 21st century ice melt" was published in Nature showing that ice sheets melting in the coming decades will have global consequences on sea levels, air temperatures, ocean circulation and weather variability. rdcu.be/blhHn
A review paper by Pippa Whitehouse and I, Matt King and Doug Wiens was published in Nature Communications highlighting recent work and future directions in research on interactions between the solid Earth and sea level processes and the Antarctic ice sheet,
titled "Solid Earth Change and Evolution of the Antarctic Ice Sheet".
January 2019
I will be teaching EPSC 510 - Geodynamics, an upper level undergraduate class covering data and modeling of a range of different geophysical processes.
I gave a talk on "Ice sheets and sea level in a changing climate" at McGill's Soup and Science event - short lunchtime talks and networking giving undergraduate students a change to hear about research happening at McGill, chat with professors, and find out how to get involved.
December 2018
The group is gearing up for the AGU Fall Meeting, Dec. 9-14th in Washington, DC. Here is where you can hear about our work:
Monday Dec. 10th
10:50-11:05am, PP12A-03: The influence of Northern Hemisphere ice sheets on Antarctic ice dynamics during the Last Deglaciation
(oral presentation by Natalya Gomez)
13:40-18:00, PP13C-1349: Modeling Short-term Ice sheet - Sea level - Solid Earth Interactions within a Glacial-cycle Timescale Simulation (poster presentation by Holly Han)
14:40-14:55, EP13B-05: New Evidence of an Ancient Martian Ocean from the Global Distribution of Valley Networks
(oral presentation by Erik Chan)
Thursday Dec. 13
17:30-17:45, G44A-07: What Do GPS-derived 1-D Viscosity Models Represent Given Antarctica's Complex 3-D Structure? (oral presentation by Evelyn Powell)
Friday Dec. 14
10:35-10:50am, G52A-02: Quantifying the uncertainty in GNSS-R sea level measurements (oral presentation by David Purnell)
At the same time, Anna Hayden will be going to the ArcticNet Annual Scientific Meeting in Ottawa to present her work:
"Multi-century impacts of ice sheet retreat on sea level and tides in Hudson Bay" (poster presentation on Tuesday Dec 11th)
November 2018
Dave Purnell and Erik Chan's research was featured in the McGill Space Institute's 2017-2018 annual report. Check out page 12 for a look at the work Dave and I have been doing in collaboration with David Holland at New York University, and page 19 for Erik Chan's work on "The Fluid Case of Ancient Mars".
October 2018
Linda Pan presented her research on sea level and tide projections as an NSERC summer undergraduate researcher at McGill's undergraduate research conference.
Our paper “Estimating Modern Elevations of Pliocene Shorelines Using a Coupled Ice Sheet‐Earth‐Sea Level Model” by David Pollard and I, Rob DeConto and Holly Han is now out in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
September 2018
I spent 2 weeks in Finse, Norway as a lecturer at an international Advanced Climate Dynamics Course (ACDC) on Hemispheric Asymmetry in Climate. Holly Han attended the course as a student as well and we both left inspired and motivated. Check out the video that one of the students, Danielle Lemmon, made about the experience.
August 2018
I took a vacation in Mont Tremblant, Quebec with my wonderful partner filled with biking, hiking, swimming, meditating, cooking, yoga and plenty of rest! Breaks are so important - I returned to work energized with a clear head and fresh perspective.
July 2018
Erik Chan, a post doc with me at the McGill Space Institute lead a paper with Taylor Perron, Jerry Mitrovica and I exploring the possibility of an ancient ocean on Mars. The paper is in press in the Journal of Geophysical Research - Planets.
Holly Han received the J.B. Lynch Fellowship and Dave Purnell received the LeRoy Memorial Fellowship. These fellowships are awarded to outstanding graduate students in the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department at McGill University.
June 2018
PhD student Dave Purnell and I traveled to Greenland to install instruments in Disko Bay to measure sea level change and ice loss of the Jakobshavn Glacier, the fastest flowing glacier on record.
MSc student Anna Hayden and I attended the Polar2018 meeting in Davos, Switzerland, where I gave a talk and she presented her work on sea level and ocean tide changes in the Hudson Bay complex in Northern Canada.
May 2018
The final version of my paper on the influence of lateral variations in Earth structure on past ice sheet evolution in Antarctica with Konstantin Latychev (Harvard) and David Pollard (Penn State) is now out in the Journal of Climate and available here.
April 2018
Masters student Anna Mireilla Hayden was awarded an NSERC Postdoctoral fellowship - Congratulations Anna! Anna is working on exploring the influence of sea level change on ocean tides in the Hudson Bay complex in Northern Canada and will be presenting her research at Polar2018 in Davos, Switzerland this June.
Holly Han and I had a productive and inspiring visit to the Geosciences Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where I gave a department seminar, we heard about the exciting climate research of students and faculty in the Geosciences Department and we met with David Pollard (Penn State), Rob DeConto and his group to discuss our research on climate, ice sheets, sea level and the solid Earth.
PhD student David Purnell passed his qualifying exam - congratulations Dave! Dave works on observations of sea level fingerprints and ice mass loss.
March 2018
Holly Han and my paper titled "The impact of water loading on postglacial decay times in Hudson Bay" on glacial isostatic adjustment following deglaciation of the Laurentide Ice Sheet in North America came out in Earth and Planetary Sciences Letters. It is available here.
February 2018
My paper on the influence of lateral variations in Earth structure on past ice sheet evolution in Antarctica with Konstantin Latychev (Harvard) and David Pollard (Penn State) was accepted for publication in the Journal of Climate. An early online release of the manuscript, unformatted, is available here.
I gave the 2018 C. Gordon Winder Memorial SCUGOG Public Lecture and visiting the Department of Earth Sciences at Western University in London, Ontario on February 1st-2nd.
January 2018
I traveled to Washington DC to participate in an expert elicitation on the contributions of ice sheets to future sea level change run by Resources for the Future, Rutgers University and Princeton University.
December 2017
Two publications I co-authored came out this month. One explores the sensitivity of variations of the Antarctic Ice Sheet to Earth structure during the Last Deglaciation, the Pliocene and the future, and the other estimates the impact of ice sheet collapse on global ocean tides. See a news article about the latter Here, and the papers themselves here:
Pollard, D., Gomez, N. and DeConto, R.. (2017). Variations of the Antarctic Ice Sheet in a coupled ice- sheet – Earth - sea level model:
sensitivity to viscoelastic Earth structure. J. Geophys. Res. Earth Surface., 122. doi: 10.1002/2017JF004371
Wilmes, S.B., Green, J.A.M., Gomez, N., Rippeth, T.P., and Lau, H.. (2017). Global tidal impacts of large-scale ice-sheet collapses. J.
Geophys. Res., 122. doi: 10.1002/2017JC013109
I will be attending the AGU fall meeting in New Orleans, USA, and giving a presentation on "Interaction of ice sheets, sea level and GIA in a region of complex Earth structure" in a session G008.
More Information
My students attended the Arctic Change 2017 conference in Quebec City.
November 2017
I gave seminars at the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Ottawa University and in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
I attended the PALSEA2 5th workshop: Phasing of ice sheet and sea-level responses to past climate change in Playa del Carmen, Mexico.
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October 2017
Undergrad student Katarina Kuhnert won second place in her category at the McGill Undergraduate Research Conference for her poster on Arctic Sea Level Change and Policy. She will also present at the Ouranos Climate Symposium in November.
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September 2017
I convened a session on Glacial isostatic adjustment on a heterogeneous Earth at the International Association of Geodesy's 1st Circular Workshop on Glacial Isostatic Adjustment and Elastic Deformation in Reykjavik, Iceland.
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July 2017
I chaired a session on Paleo sea level data and GIA modelling and gave an invited talk on Insights from coupled modeling on ice, sea level, and solid Earth changes in Antarctica at the International WCRP and IOC conference on Regional Sea Level Change and Coastal Impacts in New York City, New York, USA.
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June 2017
PhD student Holly Han attended the POLENET Glacial Seismology Training School in Fort Collins, Colorado, USA.
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May 2017
The Gomez group went to dinner to celebrate a great year! Three students graduated, Jake completed his undergraduate Honours thesis, Anna is beginning an MsC in the group, and we have two additional summer students, Gabriel and Katarina.
February 2017
I was the Faculty Feature in McGill University's sustainability publication The Sandbox, discussing climate science and the implications of climate change for society.
Read the article Here
After a much needed break to recover from all the challenges of 2020, a new semester begins. While it is not the easiest time of the year for Montreal, with a strict curfew in place and all but non-essential services and schools closed due to covid-19 in the thick of winter, the group is staying well and keeping up with each other and continuing to help each other learn in group meetings and Slack interactions.
This semester, I am teaching perhaps my favourite course, EPSC510 Geodynamics! I have a great group of students from a range of programs at McGill, from geology, physics, planetary science to atmosphere ocean sciences, and I find it exciting to show students how geodynamics of the solid Earth is relevant to all of these areas of research. We are making it all work online so far, with lots of breakout discussions, in-class hands-on activities and interactive lectures with well-timed cat sighting interruptions. Inspired by Black History Month coming up next month, I've also begun playing a song by a Black or Indigenous artist and sharing a bit about the artist every week during lecture breaks. So far we have heard Sam Cooke, Ella Fitzgerald and Koko Taylor.
December 2020
Students in Earth Systems Applications (ESYS500) - the capstone course of McGill's Earth Systems Science program - presented the research projects they have been working on all semester. The theme that we picked this year was "The Impact of Covid-19 on the Earth System", and groups chose to look at a variety of things from there, from carbon emissions to aerosols to meat production. They found and analyzed data, built numerical models and delved extensively into the literature as well. I love teaching this course because it makes me reflect on what doing research is all about, I get to see through students eyes as they discover the research process, often for the first time, and I also get to learn from them as they become the experts in their research topics over the course of the semester.
Our research group finished off the semester by attending virtual AGU. Julia Morales-Aguire presented her work on glacial earthquakes in Greenland, Jeannette Wan gave a talk on the impact of spatial resolution in numerical models of Earth deformation and sea level change near ice sheet grounding lines in the West Antarctic, Maryam Yousefi presented her PhD work on geodynamics and sea level change along the North American West Coast, and Dave Purnell presented his latest paper, with Willam Minarik, David Porter and I in public review with ESurfD, on a new technique of making precise water level measurements using low-cost GNSS antenna arrays. I also presented on my latest paper in Nature, "Antarctic ice dynamics amplified by Northern Hemisphere sea level forcing".
November 2020
The World Climate Research Programm (WCRP) Grand Challenges Committee on Regional Sea Level and Coastal Impacts met online with members joining from all over the world to discuss future plans, especially focussing on bringing the gaps between sea level scientists, policy makers and coastal planners, and on planning the next international sea level conference in 2022. The work package on long term sea level and glacial isostatic adjustment that I lead with Tom James, Mark Tamisiea and Roderik van de Wal presented recent research highlights in our field revealing what studying how ice sheets and sea levels have evolved in Earth's history can help us to better interpret modern records of current changes and inform future projections in a warming climate.
October 2020
A paper led by MSc student Anna Hayden with Sophie Wilmes, Mattias Greene, Linda Pan, Holly Han and Nick Golledge has now been published on the "Multi-century impacts of ice sheet retreat on sea levels and ocean tides in Hudson Bay". This study brought together sea level, ice sheet and ocean tide modelers to understand future sea level and ocean tide changes in Northern Canada. Hudson Bay is a shallow bay in northern Canada surrounded by coastal communities and ecosystems that are vulnerable to future sea level change. The bay was ice covered 21,000 years ago, and sea level is currently falling there due to ongoing land uplift since the ice retreated. It is unclear if this trend will continue as the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets melt, contributing to spatially variable sea level changes. Sea level changes will also impact ocean tides due to their sensitivity to water depth. We model future sea level and tide changes in the Hudson Bay region associated with land uplift and projections of Greenland and Antarctic ice loss over the next 500 years. We find that both the sign and the magnitude of the sea level change and associated response of ocean tides in the coming centuries remain in the balance, depending on how the Antarctic ice sheet on the South Pole responds to future climate warming.
Hayden, A.‐M., Wilmes, S.‐B., Gomez, N., Green, J. A. M., Pan, L., Han, H., & Golledge, N. R. (2020). Multi‐century impacts of ice sheet retreat on sea level and ocean tides in Hudson Bay. Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, 125, e2019JC015104. https://doi.org/10.1029/2019JC015104
I also had the pleasure of convening a session on "Sea level and ice-sheet changes, glacial isostatic adjustment, and landscape evolution" with Jessica Creveling and Vivi Pedersen at the Geological Society of America online meeting this month. We were grateful to have such engaging speakers and poster presenters join us on the adventure of navigating the world of online science conferencing together.
September 2020
PALSEA, a working group focussed on understanding responses of ice sheets and sea levels to past climate changes hosted its first Express Virtual meeting. My whole research group attended and I gave an invited talk on my work exploring the role of Northern Hemisphere ice cover changes on Antarctic Ice Sheet Dynamics over the last glacial cycle. It was so motivating to sea colleagues again and hear about exciting new sea level research. One major advantage of the virtual environment is that it made the meeting accessible to many more researchers, students especially, based all over the world.
August 2020
This month, I finally submitted my application package to McGill to apply for tenure! It felt like such a big milestone to put together and submit a summary of all I've done since I started as an assistant professor 5 years ago. It is not often that we take the time to take a step back and take stalk of what we have done, and I couldn't help but feel proud of the research, teaching and service work I have contributed as a faculty member at McGill. From building and funding an exciting and impactful research program, to training a productive research group of exceptionally recognized junior scientists who have continued on to positions in academia and industry, to educating hundreds of students about the Earth and climate systems, and dedicating service to help my communities at McGill and internationally to grow and thrive, there is much to feel good about. It was particularly nice to look back on all these moments from my home office where I have been missing seeing my students and colleagues so much during the pandemic.
July 2020
PhD student Dave Purnell has been awarded a 2020 Paros Scholarship in Geophysical Instrumentation from the American Geophysical Union (AGU). Paros scholarships recognize outstanding graduate students demonstrating interest in geophysical instrumentation and precision field measurements. He will receive the award at this year's AGU Fall Meeting in December.
Dave's paper on "Quantifying the Uncertainty in Ground-Based GNSS-Reflectometry Sea Level Measurements" with coauthors Erik Chan (a former post doc in our group), Joakim Strandberg, David Holland, Thomas Hobiger and I has just become available for early access on the IEEE JSTARS (Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing) website. GNSS-Reflectometry is a newly emerging technique to measure water level changes that involves using a GNSS station (Global Navigation Satellite System, e.g. GPS is a type of GNSS) to track sea level by analyzing the satellite signals collected by the GNSS that reflect off the surface of the water first. This study develops a method for quantifying the precision of these measurements and the sources of uncertainty, and includes an open-access code repository with functions for obtaining, analyzing and estimating the precision of GNSS-Reflectometry observations available on Github here.
Purnell, D.J., Gomez, N., Chan, N.H., Strandberg, J., Holland, D.H. and Hobiger, T. (2020). Quantifying the uncertainty in ground-based GNSS-Reflectometry sea level measurements. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing (JSTARS) doi: 10.1109/JSTARS.2020.3010413.
April 2020
It is a strange feeling to read over previous month's updates below, as Covid-19 has changed how we do just about everything in such a short time. On March 14th McGill University shut down and began distance learning. My team and I are staying at home to help flatten the curve and slow the spread of Covid-19. Some of my students went back to stay with their families in countries across the globe, others are closer. Despite the different time zones and the lack of face to face contact we are still carrying on with our research as each of our situations permits, and putting our wellbeing first. Some of our field projects on the St. Lawrence River and in Greenland have had to be postponed, but we will be back out there eventually and we have plenty of research to work on in the meantime. As a team we continue to meet regularly on Zoom and use Slack to discuss our research and support each other. We are all healthy and will continue to work at a distance until it is safe to meet again. Please stay healthy and keep washing those hands!
March 2020
My partner and I are getting ready to leave for Château Mont Sainte-Anne near Québec City to enjoy a weekend in the snow before I attend the Annual Scientific Meeting of Québec Océan where I will give a keynote talk about ice sheets, sea level change and glacial isostatic adjustment. I am looking forward to getting to know the community of researchers studying a range of topics connected to ocean science in Québec.
January 2020
Hello and Happy New Year!
I started off the new year with a visit to Leeds University for the kick off meeting of the ERC's RISeR project lead by Natasha Barlow investigating the rates, magnitude and spatial patterns of sea level change during the Last Interglacial. I also had a chance to visit with Lauren Gregoire and Ruza Ivanovic and their research groups, and attend the Quaternary Research Association's Annual Discussion Meeting where I gave a keynote talk.
December 2019
We went to the AGU Fall Meeting in San Francisco this month, where I co-chaired a session on “Investigating the Feedbacks between Solid Earth Properties and the Cryosphere” and Holly Han presented her research on the influence of solid Earth deformation and sea level change on the evolution of Northern Hemisphere ice sheets over the last glacial cycle. As this year's Cryosphere Early Career award winner I also had the pleasure of giving a talk in the John F. Nye Lecture and Honored Member Presentations session, alongside AGU Fellows Cecilia Bitz and Dorothy Hall, and Nye Lecturer Helen Fricker.
I am now about to head off to Toronto to see my family and take a well-deserved break. Wishing you all a joyful holiday!
November 2019
On Tuesday Nov. 19th at 12:30pm I will be giving a Geotop seminar at UQAM. I am looking forward to this opportunity to share my group's research with a group of Montreal's geoscience students and researchers.
October 2019
This semester, with Jeff McKenzie, I am teaching the capstone course of McGill's Earth System Science program, ESYS500. In this course, the students work collaboratively on a research project, going through the whole process from coming up with a research topic, reviewing literature, developing a hypothesis, finding data, and doing data analysis and modeling to come up with results that they present to members of the Earth Systems Science community at the end of the semester. This year, with help from McGill's Writing Center, I introduced a new component to the course. Students have been blogging about their experiences with the research process and their results as they go along. Their blog is now live and you can follow their progress here:
Earth Systems Science Research in the St Lawrence River Basin Blog
I also had the fantastic experience of being a storyteller at and event where Confabulation teamed up with Broad Science to get a diverse group of scientists to share true, personal stories about their lives and work. I told a story about my childhood imagination, camping and climate change. It was such a good learning experience to put it together, and a vulnerable but positive experience to get up there and share it.
September 2019
September was such an exciting month!
I was honoured to be invited to attend and speak at my first International Paleooceanography Conference (ICP), this year south of the equator for the first time in Sydney Australia. I loved the format of this meeting, with single session talks with all attendees together, followed by a long lunch and poster session with plenty of time for engaging discussion. I met many new people from around the world and discussed some promising research collaborations.
Later in the month, I went to Ottawa for a meeting on Glacial Isostatic Adjustment, Ice Sheets and Sea Level Change that I co-organized with Tom James, Glenn Milne, Pippa Whitehouse and Matt King. We were very happy with how the meeting went and grateful to all of our presenters for giving such engaging talks and posters and highlighting the diverse range of cutting-edge research in this interdisciplinary field.
And finally, to finish off the month, I returned to Montreal for one day to attend the Climate March with 500,000 others (that's more than 1/4 of the population of Montreal!), and then went to join the Advanced Climate Dynamics Courses (ACDC) Summer School on The Anthropocene as a lecturer.
August 2019
I am delighted and deeply honoured to have been given this year's AGU Cryosphere Early Career Award! The award is given to an 'outstanding junior scientist within 10 years of their Ph.D. for a significant contribution to cryospheric science and technology', and generously sponsored by the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). The award will be presented at the American Geophysical Union's Fall Meeting in December and I will also have the opportunity to give a talk about my research there on Tuesday December 10 at 13:40 in Moscone West 2022-2024 before the Nye Lecture.
July 2019
Lots of news this month!
I have been nominated vice-chair of the International Association of Geodesy (IAG)'s subsection on Cryospheric Deformation with Jeff Freymueller as chair. I look forward to helping to forward research and facilitate collaborations and scientific discussions in this area.
Another reminder, as the abstract deadline fast approaches, that I am co-convening AGU Fall Meeting session C022 “Investigating the Feedbacks between Solid Earth Properties and the Cryosphere” with Samantha Hansen, Ricarda Dziadek and Aurélien Mordret. Abstracts can be submitted here: https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm19/prelim.cgi/Session/74693
PhD student Holly Han and I are currently at the Quaternary Research meeting INQUA in Dublin Ireland. I gave an invited talk in a great session on paleo-ice sheet model-data interactions (thank you to chairs Jeremy Ely and Lauren Gregoire), and Holly spoke about her work on coupled ice sheet - sea level modeling in the Northern Hemisphere. We have seen a lot of exciting new data and modeling on past climate, sea level and ice sheets here!
PhD students Dave Purnell and Holly Han both gave talks on their work at the IUGG General Assembly in Montreal, and I gave an invited talk on in an interesting interdisciplinary session on Geodesy for Atmospheric and Hydrospheric Climate Research. It was a great meeting and we enjoyed having colleagues from all over the world in our home city.
June 2019
I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at the Women in Physics Canada conference held at McGill University in Montreal this June. I learned a lot about physics as well as equity, diversity and inclusion in academia attending the conference, and it was an honour to have the opportunity to engage with and speak to the next generation of physicists. The organizers did a fantastic job with this conference.
I am looking forward to co-convening AGU Fall Meeting session C022 “Investigating the Feedbacks between Solid Earth Properties and the Cryosphere” with Samantha Hansen, Ricarda Dziadek and Aurélien Mordret. Abstracts can be submitted here:
https://agu.confex.com/agu/fm19/prelim.cgi/Session/74693 and the deadline is July 31, 2019. Hope to see you in San Francisco!
May 2019
I am giving two public outreach talks this month about melting ice and sea level change in a warming climate. One is part of AstroMcGill's public lecture series on May 16th at 7pm on McGill campus, and the other is on Tuesday May 21st at McClean's Pub as part of a Science of Climate Change night at the Pint of Science Festival.
April 2019
Sea level change is a highly interdisciplinary field, and inconsistent understanding of related terminology and concepts across disciplines often gets in the way of progress. "Concepts and Terminology for Sea Level: Mean, Variability and Change, Both Local and Global" lead by Jonathan Gregory that I was involved in along with many others aims to get us all on the same page. https://rdcu.be/bzzjX
I am currently enjoying visiting the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences at Caltech. It has been a pleasure to give a seminar and meet with such an engaging group of scientists. Later this week I travel to the University of Texas at Austin to give a seminar in the Jackson School of Geoscience - I am looking forward to connecting with colleagues there and meeting the department. I have been thinking about ways to cut back on my air travel recently, so I am happy to have been able to combine these two visits.
March 2019
I attended the ACDC 10 year anniversary alumni conference in Rodane, Norway. I attended an ACDC school on ice-ocean interactions as a graduate student in 2010, and the connections I made there have had a very positive impact on my career and research. Last year, I was delighted to join the organizing team and attend ACDC again as a lecturer this time. At the anniversary conference, it was remarkable to meet the wide range of climate scientists who had attended ACDC as students, and hear about how their research has unfolded since. I left feeling inspired about where our field is going, both in terms of research and community. I am looking forward to lecturing at the next ACDC on the Anthropocene in Yosemite National Park in September.
February 2019
Our new paper "Global consequences of 21st century ice melt" was published in Nature showing that ice sheets melting in the coming decades will have global consequences on sea levels, air temperatures, ocean circulation and weather variability. rdcu.be/blhHn
A review paper by Pippa Whitehouse and I, Matt King and Doug Wiens was published in Nature Communications highlighting recent work and future directions in research on interactions between the solid Earth and sea level processes and the Antarctic ice sheet,
titled "Solid Earth Change and Evolution of the Antarctic Ice Sheet".
January 2019
I will be teaching EPSC 510 - Geodynamics, an upper level undergraduate class covering data and modeling of a range of different geophysical processes.
I gave a talk on "Ice sheets and sea level in a changing climate" at McGill's Soup and Science event - short lunchtime talks and networking giving undergraduate students a change to hear about research happening at McGill, chat with professors, and find out how to get involved.
December 2018
The group is gearing up for the AGU Fall Meeting, Dec. 9-14th in Washington, DC. Here is where you can hear about our work:
Monday Dec. 10th
10:50-11:05am, PP12A-03: The influence of Northern Hemisphere ice sheets on Antarctic ice dynamics during the Last Deglaciation
(oral presentation by Natalya Gomez)
13:40-18:00, PP13C-1349: Modeling Short-term Ice sheet - Sea level - Solid Earth Interactions within a Glacial-cycle Timescale Simulation (poster presentation by Holly Han)
14:40-14:55, EP13B-05: New Evidence of an Ancient Martian Ocean from the Global Distribution of Valley Networks
(oral presentation by Erik Chan)
Thursday Dec. 13
17:30-17:45, G44A-07: What Do GPS-derived 1-D Viscosity Models Represent Given Antarctica's Complex 3-D Structure? (oral presentation by Evelyn Powell)
Friday Dec. 14
10:35-10:50am, G52A-02: Quantifying the uncertainty in GNSS-R sea level measurements (oral presentation by David Purnell)
At the same time, Anna Hayden will be going to the ArcticNet Annual Scientific Meeting in Ottawa to present her work:
"Multi-century impacts of ice sheet retreat on sea level and tides in Hudson Bay" (poster presentation on Tuesday Dec 11th)
November 2018
Dave Purnell and Erik Chan's research was featured in the McGill Space Institute's 2017-2018 annual report. Check out page 12 for a look at the work Dave and I have been doing in collaboration with David Holland at New York University, and page 19 for Erik Chan's work on "The Fluid Case of Ancient Mars".
October 2018
Linda Pan presented her research on sea level and tide projections as an NSERC summer undergraduate researcher at McGill's undergraduate research conference.
Our paper “Estimating Modern Elevations of Pliocene Shorelines Using a Coupled Ice Sheet‐Earth‐Sea Level Model” by David Pollard and I, Rob DeConto and Holly Han is now out in the Journal of Geophysical Research.
September 2018
I spent 2 weeks in Finse, Norway as a lecturer at an international Advanced Climate Dynamics Course (ACDC) on Hemispheric Asymmetry in Climate. Holly Han attended the course as a student as well and we both left inspired and motivated. Check out the video that one of the students, Danielle Lemmon, made about the experience.
August 2018
I took a vacation in Mont Tremblant, Quebec with my wonderful partner filled with biking, hiking, swimming, meditating, cooking, yoga and plenty of rest! Breaks are so important - I returned to work energized with a clear head and fresh perspective.
July 2018
Erik Chan, a post doc with me at the McGill Space Institute lead a paper with Taylor Perron, Jerry Mitrovica and I exploring the possibility of an ancient ocean on Mars. The paper is in press in the Journal of Geophysical Research - Planets.
Holly Han received the J.B. Lynch Fellowship and Dave Purnell received the LeRoy Memorial Fellowship. These fellowships are awarded to outstanding graduate students in the Earth and Planetary Sciences Department at McGill University.
June 2018
PhD student Dave Purnell and I traveled to Greenland to install instruments in Disko Bay to measure sea level change and ice loss of the Jakobshavn Glacier, the fastest flowing glacier on record.
MSc student Anna Hayden and I attended the Polar2018 meeting in Davos, Switzerland, where I gave a talk and she presented her work on sea level and ocean tide changes in the Hudson Bay complex in Northern Canada.
May 2018
The final version of my paper on the influence of lateral variations in Earth structure on past ice sheet evolution in Antarctica with Konstantin Latychev (Harvard) and David Pollard (Penn State) is now out in the Journal of Climate and available here.
April 2018
Masters student Anna Mireilla Hayden was awarded an NSERC Postdoctoral fellowship - Congratulations Anna! Anna is working on exploring the influence of sea level change on ocean tides in the Hudson Bay complex in Northern Canada and will be presenting her research at Polar2018 in Davos, Switzerland this June.
Holly Han and I had a productive and inspiring visit to the Geosciences Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where I gave a department seminar, we heard about the exciting climate research of students and faculty in the Geosciences Department and we met with David Pollard (Penn State), Rob DeConto and his group to discuss our research on climate, ice sheets, sea level and the solid Earth.
PhD student David Purnell passed his qualifying exam - congratulations Dave! Dave works on observations of sea level fingerprints and ice mass loss.
March 2018
Holly Han and my paper titled "The impact of water loading on postglacial decay times in Hudson Bay" on glacial isostatic adjustment following deglaciation of the Laurentide Ice Sheet in North America came out in Earth and Planetary Sciences Letters. It is available here.
February 2018
My paper on the influence of lateral variations in Earth structure on past ice sheet evolution in Antarctica with Konstantin Latychev (Harvard) and David Pollard (Penn State) was accepted for publication in the Journal of Climate. An early online release of the manuscript, unformatted, is available here.
I gave the 2018 C. Gordon Winder Memorial SCUGOG Public Lecture and visiting the Department of Earth Sciences at Western University in London, Ontario on February 1st-2nd.
January 2018
I traveled to Washington DC to participate in an expert elicitation on the contributions of ice sheets to future sea level change run by Resources for the Future, Rutgers University and Princeton University.
December 2017
Two publications I co-authored came out this month. One explores the sensitivity of variations of the Antarctic Ice Sheet to Earth structure during the Last Deglaciation, the Pliocene and the future, and the other estimates the impact of ice sheet collapse on global ocean tides. See a news article about the latter Here, and the papers themselves here:
Pollard, D., Gomez, N. and DeConto, R.. (2017). Variations of the Antarctic Ice Sheet in a coupled ice- sheet – Earth - sea level model:
sensitivity to viscoelastic Earth structure. J. Geophys. Res. Earth Surface., 122. doi: 10.1002/2017JF004371
Wilmes, S.B., Green, J.A.M., Gomez, N., Rippeth, T.P., and Lau, H.. (2017). Global tidal impacts of large-scale ice-sheet collapses. J.
Geophys. Res., 122. doi: 10.1002/2017JC013109
I will be attending the AGU fall meeting in New Orleans, USA, and giving a presentation on "Interaction of ice sheets, sea level and GIA in a region of complex Earth structure" in a session G008.
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My students attended the Arctic Change 2017 conference in Quebec City.
November 2017
I gave seminars at the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Ottawa University and in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
I attended the PALSEA2 5th workshop: Phasing of ice sheet and sea-level responses to past climate change in Playa del Carmen, Mexico.
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October 2017
Undergrad student Katarina Kuhnert won second place in her category at the McGill Undergraduate Research Conference for her poster on Arctic Sea Level Change and Policy. She will also present at the Ouranos Climate Symposium in November.
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September 2017
I convened a session on Glacial isostatic adjustment on a heterogeneous Earth at the International Association of Geodesy's 1st Circular Workshop on Glacial Isostatic Adjustment and Elastic Deformation in Reykjavik, Iceland.
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July 2017
I chaired a session on Paleo sea level data and GIA modelling and gave an invited talk on Insights from coupled modeling on ice, sea level, and solid Earth changes in Antarctica at the International WCRP and IOC conference on Regional Sea Level Change and Coastal Impacts in New York City, New York, USA.
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June 2017
PhD student Holly Han attended the POLENET Glacial Seismology Training School in Fort Collins, Colorado, USA.
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May 2017
The Gomez group went to dinner to celebrate a great year! Three students graduated, Jake completed his undergraduate Honours thesis, Anna is beginning an MsC in the group, and we have two additional summer students, Gabriel and Katarina.
February 2017
I was the Faculty Feature in McGill University's sustainability publication The Sandbox, discussing climate science and the implications of climate change for society.
Read the article Here