Ice sheet-sea level-solid earth interactions
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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 the Geodynamics of 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. I work at the intersection between solid Earth geophysics and climate science. My research centers 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
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.
More Information
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.
More Information
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.
More Information
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.
More Information
June 2017
PhD student Holly Han attended the POLENET Glacial Seismology Training School in Fort Collins, Colorado, USA.
More Information
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
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.
More Information
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.
More Information
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.
More Information
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.
More Information
June 2017
PhD student Holly Han attended the POLENET Glacial Seismology Training School in Fort Collins, Colorado, USA.
More Information
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