Ada Loewen successfully defended her PhD thesis “Understanding fracture in confined landfast sea ice by integrating observations and Inuit Knowledge: A case study from Admiralty Inlet, Nunavut“!  Congratulations on a unique and thorough study that spans approaches from Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar remote sensing to Inuit Knowledge and brings them together to learn about when, [...]

Congratulations to Ada Loewen, winner of this year’s Tertia M.C. Hughes Graduate Student Prize from the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS). Ada was selected by the awards committee for two contributions of special merit: her impactful community-engaged oceanographic research in Nunavut and her exceptional service to CMOS.

Congratulations to PhD candidate Ada Loewen who just published a study in Canadian Journal of Remote Sensing that identified over 4000 fractures in the landfast sea ice of Admiralty Inlet.  This paper describes a method that connects remotely sensed data (interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR), optical imagery), Inuit Knowledge, and in-situ observations to identify fractures [...]

We are seeking a PhD student with strong quantitative skills for an Arctic glacio-hydrology research project in the Water and Ice Research Laboratory (WIRL), Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. The project will build on WIRL’s long-term Milne Fiord research program on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian high Arctic, and will [...]

A new paper that examines the role of the ‘footloose’ calving mechanism in ice islands was just published in the Journal of Glaciology.   Jesse Smith, compared observed ice island calving events from the Canadian Ice Island Drift, Deterioration and Detection (CI2D3) Database with predictions from a finite element model created by Mahmud Sazidy.  Simulated rams [...]

A Colorado University Boulder–led study, published recently in Nature Geoscience, investigates the retreat of Antarctica’s Hektoria Glacier and highlights the role of the ice plain bed geometry in this process. In 2023, the glacier retreated at an unprecedented rate, losing a total of 8 kilometres of ice in just two months. Yulia Antropova, a PhD [...]

It has been a while since we posted on social media.  It didn't really seem like that much fun anymore as  Twitter morphed into X.  But now the WIRL site is sharing posts with Bluesky - you can find u...