Under global warming, the calving of icebergs into the polar oceans is expected to increase. As a result, the role that icebergs play in Earth's climate system has received a recent surge of interest, and efforts are underway to explicitly represent icebergs in GCMs. In this talk, I will present an idealized analytical model that we developed to aid this effort. I will use the model to address (i) which climate model variables are most important to accurately model iceberg evolution and (ii) whether climate models do a good job simulating these variables. I will then turn to episodes of massive iceberg discharge, called Heinrich Events, which occurred during the last glacial period. These events are believed to have had large-scale impacts on the global climate system. However, modeling icebergs that lived and melted more than 10,000 years ago comes with its own challenges, as we will see.

Till Wagner is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Physics and Physical Oceanography at UNC Wilmington. His research focuses on the physical processes governing the Earth's high latitudes, with an emphasis on atmosphere-ocean-ice interactions. He investigates these processes using a combination of theory, numerical modeling, and observations. Before coming to North Carolina, Till was a postdoc at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. He holds a M.Sci. in Physics and Philosophy from the University of Bristol and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Cambridge.

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