Dr Claudia Cenedese: Everything you always wanted to know about icebergs melting (but were afraid to ask)

Dr Claudia Cenedese, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Abstract

Iceberg calving accounts for half of the mass discharge from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. Through their displacement and progressive melt, icebergs can impact both the regional and large-scale ocean circulation and marine ecosystems. Notwithstanding their importance, our understanding of where and how icebergs melt is limited and their representation in ocean and climate models is oversimplistic. As a result, model-based predictions of iceberg melt
rates, of the fate of the meltwater, and of its impact on the ocean are highly uncertain. The focus of this lecture will be on laboratory experiments investigating
the influence of the ambient flow, the icebergs’ aspect ratio and the Earth rotation on iceberg melting.

Biography

Claudia Cenedese is a Senior Scientist in the Physical Oceanography Department at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (MA, USA), an adjunct Associate Professor in the College of Engineering at the University of Canterbury (New Zealand), a faculty of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Summer School, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. She earned a PhD at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics of
the University of Cambridge (UK) after a MS+BS in Environmental Engineering at the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. The focus of her
research is to improve our understanding of how mesoscale and submesoscale processes influence and modify the general circulation of the ocean.