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Alex Robel

@iceclimate.bsky.social
1.5K followers 380 following 335 posts

Ice sheets, climate, math, coasts, community resilience. Associate Professor Georgia Tech EAS. he/him. iccl.eas.gatech.edu

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Reposted by Alex Robel
Quanta Magazine @quantamagazine.org · 06/10/2026
Columnist Jordana Cepelewicz envisions a world where, despite AI’s dominion, future mathematicians will still have much to do. It just may look nothing like what they’re doing now. www.quantamagazine.org/is-ai-the-en…
quantamagazine.org
Is AI the End of Math As We Know It? | Quanta Magazine
Mathematicians are facing the sudden shift with grief, anger, and a desperate search for fresh ideas: “If we don’t adapt, there’s just no more math in 50 years.”
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
@gtresearch.bsky.social @gtsciences.bsky.social
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
🚨🚨 Georgia Tech is hiring multiple open-rank tenure-track positions focused on 🍃 ecology 🍃 and 🌊 coastal processes 🌊 with a particular (but not exclusive) interest in those who work with communities in their research tinyurl.com/GT-eco-coasts
tinyurl.com
Careers
Georgia Tech prides itself on its technological resources, collaborations, high-quality student body, and its commitment to building an outstanding and diverse community of learning, discovery, and creation. We strongly encourage applicants whose values align with our institutional values, as outlined in our strategic plan. These values include academic excellence, diversity of thought and experience, inquiry and innovation, collaboration and community, and ethical behavior and stewardship. Georgia Tech has policies to promote a healthy work-life balance and is aware that attracting faculty may require meeting the needs of two careers.
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Reposted by Alex Robel
International Glaciological Society @igsoc.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Next IGS Global Seminar: Danielle Grau (University at Buffalo) Antarctic Meltwater Alters Future Projections of Climate and Sea Level & Sunme Zhao (Stanford University) Two perspectives on small-scale topographic effects on Antarctic subglacial hydrology More info at www.igsoc.org/event/grau-a...
igsoc.org
IGS Global Seminar: Danielle Grau & Sunme Zhao | October 7
Topic: Antarctic Meltwater Alters Future Projections of Climate and Sea Level Speaker: Danielle Grau Institution: University at Buffalo Topic: Two
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Mara Freilich @maratimes.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Does flooding on land impact the open ocean? We happened to be after flooding from atmospheric rivers in 2023 and the answer was yes! Postdoc Shailja Gangrade & team look at impacts on biology and biogeochemistry! agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/...
agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Open Ocean Biogeochemical Impacts of Extreme Terrestrial Precipitation
Anomalously high precipitation from atmospheric rivers led to elevated river discharge, low ocean salinity, and increased stratification Freshwater discharge was rapidly transported hundreds of k...
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Reposted by Alex Robel
Steven J. Gibbons @stevenjgibbons.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Last month we published a Comment in Nature Reviews: Earth and Environment entitled "Ethical considerations for #geohazard digital twins". The full article is on doi.org/10.1038/s430... There is a read-only link on rdcu.be/fw1xz Full text after embargo period and I can provide pdfs to individuals.
Screenshot of parts of the comment article "Ethical considerations for geohazard digital twins" published in Nature Reviews: Earth and Environment.
The full article is on https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-026-00811-0
There is a read-only link on https://rdcu.be/fw1xz

A full text will be made available after the embargo period but the read-only link is valid from now.
pdf-files of the final document can be provided in response to personal requests to steven.gibbons@ngi.no
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Australian Centre for Excellence in Antarctic Science (ACEAS) @antarcticsciaus.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
⛏️ OUT TODAY: new research led by ACEAS CI Prof Matt King @deformedearth.bsky.social and co-authors from 14 countries calls for an urgent, globally coordinated campaign to the Wilkes Subglacial Basin – arguably the last great unexplored frontier of #Antarctica ⬇️
nature.com
Dynamic instability of the Wilkes Subglacial Basin Ice Sheet, East Antarctica - Nature Reviews Earth & Environment
The Wilkes Subglacial Basin is a marine-based sector of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet that is vulnerable to ocean-forced melting and climate warming. This Review assesses changes in ice-sheet extent in...
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Kelly Hereid @kellyhereid.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Tapio Schneider is one of the scientists I look to most to distinguish AI-useful from AI-hype in climate science world. His thoughtful post on the Navier-Stokes blowup is a great example - AI is useful when experimental verification and data density can substitute for physical understanding... 1/2
clima.caltech.edu
Headlines and inside stories: understanding and trust in AI for mathematics, science, and engineering - CliMA
[This post was prompted by the recent discussions about the Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem and is cross-posted from Terry Tao’s blog. It lays out the reasoning behind how we use AI at CliMA.] ...
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
That is useful context, thanks!
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Any thoughts on the hydraulic conductivity values? Seems like they are decently higher than what was previously in the literature. Does this validate the Warburton 2020 upper estimate for conductivity?
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Reposted by Alex Robel
Luke Zoet @lzoet.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
New work on various physical properties of Antarctic tills we obtained from the Byrd Polar Rock Repository. Proves some useful baseline values for modeling. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...
cambridge.org
The mechanical, hydrological and mineralogic properties of 11 Antarctic tills | Journal of Glaciology | Cambridge Core
The mechanical, hydrological and mineralogic properties of 11 Antarctic tills - Volume 72
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Congrats on well deserved @agucryo.bsky.social honors for @chingyaolai.bsky.social @gbinny.bsky.social and Sophie Nowicki! www.agu.org/honors/annou...
agu.org
2026 Honorees Announcement | AGU
We applaud the 2026 Honoree’s achievements and thank all volunteers, nominators and supporters for their commitment to this program.
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Also due to valid concerns about flood risk data being flood data being uploaded to LLMs
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Currently planning community-based flood-planning workshops, and we have a whole part explaining that “AI-based”models are not the same as models using LLMs.
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Reposted by Alex Robel
Emily Atkin @emorwee.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
A few weekends ago I went to Miami and attended 9 open houses in extremely high-risk flood areas to see what agents are telling prospective buyers about them. Here is my journey
heated.world
The open houses at the edge of disaster
What are buyers being told about climate risk in Miami? I posed as one to find out.
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Reposted by Alex Robel
Shiva Muruganandham @murushiv.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Had a blast working with @iceclimate.bsky.social in the ICCL group over the last few years! Many thanks to my committee and everyone else in the GT EAS crew for a truly memorable ride.
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Of course i forgot to tag the man himself @murushiv.bsky.social
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
For his postdoc, Shiva is off to work on the next generation of @ipcc.bsky.social sea level projections for AR7 as a part of the FACTS project in @bobkopp.net's group fact-sealevel.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
fact-sealevel.readthedocs.io
Framework for Assessing Changes To Sea-level (FACTS) — Framework for Assessing Changes To Sea-level (FACTS) 1.1.2 documentation
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
His work forms the technological backbone of our new CHORUS project, in which we are working with community groups in GA and NY to co-design a web platform to run real-time simulations of the effect of adaptation infrastructure on potential flood events eas.gatech.edu/news/09/supp...
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
The second half of his PhD went all the way to the other end of the sea level problem, where he has developed an ML-based emulator of a building-scale coastal compound flood model, which can be used to evaluate the effect of coastal adaptation infrastructure on flooding in seconds
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
In the first half of his PhD, Shiva developed new methods to generate variable realizations of climate forcing for ice sheet models (see @ieeexplore.ieee.org paper linked) and led development of the NSF-funded Antarctic Ice Sheet Large Ensemble ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/102...
ieeexplore.ieee.org
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Shiva graduated from our interdisciplinary Ocean Science and Engineering PhD program, and it was truly reflected in the scope of his work and committee covering marine science, engineering and glaciology ocean.gatech.edu
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
Congrats to our newest Dr., Shiva Muruganandham! He blew us away with his dissertation "Exploring Sea Level Futures: From Antarctic Ice Loss to Coastal Flood Adaptation"
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Alex Barron @alexrbarron.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Fourth, collaborate with faculty and staff doing work related to ES, community engagement, and faculty diversity and equity initiatives to develop a shared institutional vision for rewarding and/or supporting engaged scholarship.
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Alex Barron @alexrbarron.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
It’s Fall 🍎🍁which means new classes, new textbooks and…tenure packet submissions. My own experience with the tenure process led me to get very curious how institutions do and don’t reward engaged scholarship in the tenure process. 🧵
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Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences @pnas.org · 12/09/2026
Year-to-year variability in the melting of the surface of the Greenland Ice Sheet may not be a harbinger of ice sheet destabilization, according to a study. Variability in the surface mass balance is an expected response to climate warming. In PNAS: ow.ly/2qq250ZMEvb
Meltwater in Greenland, July 2015.
CREDIT: NASA
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Reposted by Alex Robel
Georgia Tech College of Sciences @gtsciences.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
The new CHORUS research project led by @iceclimate.bsky.social will combine flood modeling, AI, and community partnerships to help coastal residents in GA and NY evaluate flooding solutions and shape resilience planning.https://sciences.gatech.edu/news/supporting-community-led-flood-resilience
sciences.gatech.edu
Supporting Community-Led Flood Resilience
The CHORUS research project will combine advanced flood modeling, artificial intelligence, and community partnerships to help coastal residents in Georgia and New York evaluate flooding solutions and ...
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
As always, the paper is open-access and all analysis code is available as an open-source repository @github.com github.com/aarobel/Illu...
github.com
GitHub - aarobel/IllusoryEWS-Repo: A repository of code to reproduce the results in Robel et al. paper on "Illusory Early-Warning Signals of Greenland Ice Sheet Destabilization"
A repository of code to reproduce the results in Robel et al. paper on "Illusory Early-Warning Signals of Greenland Ice Sheet Destabilization" - aarobel/IllusoryEWS-Repo
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
However, this doesn’t necessarily mean the Greenland ice sheet isn’t close to destabilization, just that we need to further sharpen other tools that can determine how close we may be to that point doi.org/10.1038/s415...
doi.org
Overshooting the critical threshold for the Greenland ice sheet - Nature
Simulations using two state-of-the-art ice-sheet models show that abrupt melting of the Greenland ice sheet following overshooting of the global mean temperature critical threshold can be mitigated by...
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
We conclude that traditional “early-warning signals” are not reliable indicators of ice sheet destabilization via surface melt because of this nonlinearity and consequent nonstationarity, a potential problem noted in previous EWS critiques www.nature.com/articles/s41...
nature.com
Early warning signals have limited applicability to empirical lake data - Nature Communications
Abrupt regime shifts could in theory be predicted from early warning signals. Here, the authors show that true critical transitions are challenging to classify in lake planktonic systems, due to misma...
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
2️⃣ Temporal autocorrelation in ice sheet surface melt is strongly susceptible to spurious trends on multi-decadal time scales, regardless of the ice sheet's proximity to destabilization
Outputs from simple model showing that trends in AC1 (first autoregressive coefficient) are almost equally likely to be positive or negative, regardless of the ice sheet's proximity to destabilization. Left panel shows running AC1 in two simulations with different realizations of atmospheric temperature variability, with opposite trends. Right panel shows fraction of 100,000 simulations of simple model with increasing AC1 as a function of proximity to ice sheet destabilization, with approximately half showing positive trends. Interestingly, we find a greater likelihood of decreasing AC1 with approach to the bifurcation, a byproduct of the strong non-stationarity of variance.
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
1️⃣ In a warming world, variability of surface melt in low-accumulation ice sheet regions will increase, regardless of the ice sheet's proximity to destabilization
Outputs from simple model showing that trends in variance are almost always positive, regardless of the ice sheet's proximity to destabilization. Left panel shows two running variance in two simulations with different realizations of atmospheric temperature variability, both with positive trends in variance. Right panel shows fraction of 100,000 simulations of simple model with increasing variance as a function of proximity to ice sheet destabilization, with more than 98% of simulations showing positive trends.
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
We reproduced these trends in a simple model of ice sheet mass balance and come to two conclusions 👇
A simple model with equation: dh/dt = B(t) + f(h) where B is an exponential function describing SMB as a function of ice sheet surface temperature and f is a linear restoring term as a function of ice sheet height, h.
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
The result of this increasing sensitivity is a strongly nonlinear relationship between surface melt and atmospheric temperature, as previously measured by @luketrusel.bsky.social doi.org/10.1038/s415...
doi.org
Nonlinear rise in Greenland runoff in response to post-industrial Arctic warming - Nature
Ice-core-derived melt records reveal that atmospheric warming has recently intensified Greenland ice-sheet surface melt and runoff to levels that are exceptional over at least the last 350 years.
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
So what causes increasing variability? Prior work shows that as bare ice area increases over Greenland, the ice surface becomes more sensitive to incoming shortwave radiation. Ice sheet thinning amplifies this sensitivity but is not necessary to explain it doi.org/10.1126/scia...
doi.org
Greenland Ice Sheet surface melt amplified by snowline migration and bare ice exposure
Greenland’s snowline exhibits large fluctuations and is a primary amplifier of ice sheet surface melt and runoff.
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
This isn’t consistent with a recent study which argues that trends in variance and autocorrelation of surface melt in Greenland are “early-warning signals” of ice sheet destabilization through a feedback between melt and ice sheet height doi.org/10.1073/pnas...
doi.org
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
We were surprised to find that year-to-year variability has increased over most of the ice sheet, even though these model simulations are not coupled to evolving ice sheet elevation
Map of trend rate in SMB interannual variability from the MAR SMB model, showing increasing variability of melt over most of the ice sheet from 1940-2025
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
A few years ago I asked Grant Holly, a @gtsciences.bsky.social undergrad, mentored by (now Dr!) Aminat Ambelorun, to analyze trends in variability from high-resolution models of surface mass balance (snowfall and melt) over Greenland eas.gatech.edu/undergrad/st...
eas.gatech.edu
Meet the Undergraduates of EAS | School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Excited that our new paper is out @pnas.org! We show that the observed increase in variability of yearly Greenland ice melt over recent decades is not evidence of ice sheet destabilization. Story in 🧵 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
pnas.org
PNAS
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a peer reviewed journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) - an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans...
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Lily Dove @solilyquy.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Walked through the OpenAI Navier Stokes breakthrough in my graduate-level Ocean Dynamics class today and ended on this slide. We had a super thought-provoking and respectful conversation with a huge range of opinions. Georgia Tech students rock! 🐝
Three quotes: 

1) “While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from [Buckmaster & Alpöge] usage of our products helped improve our models⁠.” 
OpenAI statement

2) “I am not happy about the presentation quality in [our] papers. Ideally, we would have preferred to spend weeks turning the LLM generated proofs into something readable from the very first page. This level of care is what these problems and the community devoted to these problems deserves.”
Prof. Tristan Buckmaster, NYU-Courant

3) “[This situation] extremely damaging to mathematics; it convinces decision makers that human mathematicians are obsolete, and it convinces young people that their passion for mathematics has no future.”
Prof. Michael Harris, Columbia University
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Ruth Mottram @ruthmottram.eurosky.social · 09/09/2026
Publication day! Our finalised paper on melange processes at Greenland glacier fronts is out now! I wrote about what we did, what we found and what it means for Greenland ice sheet retreat..
sternaparadisaea.net
A jumble of broken ice, and what it means for Greenland’s calving glaciers.
Ice mélange — sometimes known as sikussaq in Greenlandic — is that chaotic jumble of icebergs, bergy bits and sea water that sits in front of marine-terminating glaciers. It’s been described …
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
Coastal planners should see this as an opportunity to see what will happen with no further adaptation - and where they should focus their efforts
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 02/09/2026
The California coast is about to be a time machine to what every day in 2060 will look like
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Dan Ohnemus @dohnemus.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Skidaway Institute of Oceanography is continuing our search for a Director! If you or your colleague(s) are interested, the position posting is open until Nov 1, 2026. www.ugajobsearch.com/postings/468...
ugajobsearch.com
Director of Skidaway Institute of Oceanography and Professor
The University of Georgia (UGA), a land-grant, sea-grant and space-grant university with statewide commitments and responsibilities, is Georgia's oldest, most comprehensive institution of higher educa...
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Felix Pfluger @felix-pfl.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
#cryohazard #landslide #glacier #Rasuwa #Nepal. The sudden detachment of a glacier-covered rock slope turned into a horrific disaster. Release mechanisms are likely associated with polythermal glacier shift, permafrost loss, and hydrostatic pressure build-up. cf esurf.copernicus.org/articles/13/...
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Henri F. Drake @henrifdrake.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
I am recruiting a PhD student to join my group at UC Irvine in Fall 2027 to work on the Coupled Tipping Dynamics of Ocean Circulation and Ice Sheets – details in the attachment below. Please share the position with your networks!
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ESA Earth Observation @esaearth.esa.int · 24/08/2026
Earlier this month, a 76 sq km section of Petermann Glacier in northwest Greenland broke away. The newly formed tabular iceberg covers an area about the same size of Manhattan and is estimated to be up to 150 metres thick. This huge loss was captured by the Copernicus Sentinel-1 radar vision ⬇️
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Bob Kopp @bobkopp.net · 25/08/2026
New paper led by @rowanuniversity.bsky.social’s Andra Garner looks at the history of sea level projections published from 1982-2025
agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com
Evolution of Global Sea‐Level Rise Projections and Their Uncertainty
95% of all global-mean sea level projections have been produced in the United States, United Kingdom, European Union, or Australia Less than 25% of global mean sea-level projections exceed high-e...
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
Next she is off to start a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago with @miranganathan.bsky.social!
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Alex Robel @iceclimate.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
She mentored an undergraduate on work that will come out as part of a new paper very soon (more to come!)
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