EPSS Colloquium fall-2018

The polar ice caps of Earth are rapidly melting under the influence of global warming. On the Greenland ice sheet, the resulting melt water is creating many new types of glacial features, including lakes deep beneath the overlying ice, liquid water stored in aquifers in the near surface ice and snow, and stunning aquamarine ponds of melt at the surface. My team and I are investigating the properties and size of these melt pockets using geophysical tools to look through the ice and determine where and how much liquid water is present. We are using this unique Greenland environment to plan for exploring the interior of Jupiter's icy moon Europa. Our techniques for studying liquid water within the Greenland ice sheet provide crucial inputs for future NASA missions that plan to investigate the properties of the subsurface Europa ocean (and other icy ocean worlds like it) and determine if Europa could potentially harbor life.