ENHG Lecture: Global Impact of Glacier Change in Iceland, with Dr. Gudfinna Adalgeirsdottir

Dear members: we understand there have been some technical difficulties; thank you for being patient with us as we work through them. This lecture will take place on Zoom, as usual, starting at 7 pm for informal chats with members, and then beginning in earnest at 7:30. See you then! 

About the talk:

Glaciers in Iceland are responding to climate change, like all glaciers in the world.  As the temperature rises due to anthropogenic climate change, the glaciers adjust to the warmer climate by reducing their sizes.  In Iceland, 10% of the land is covered by glaciers, and the largest glacier in Europe, Vatnajökull, is located on the south east coast, where high precipitation amount maintains its size.  There are 4 large ice caps (>500 km2), 7 smaller (>10 km2) and about 250 small glaciers in Iceland with total volume about 3,400 km3 (in 2019).  If evenly spread over Iceland, the ice would be a 35 m thick layer, which corresponds to about 9 mm of potential global sea level rise. The glaciers in Iceland have reduced by 16 ± 4 % since ~1890, when they were at the maximum extent at the end of the Little Ice Age.  Almost half of the total mass loss occurred in the period 1995-2019.  Similar reduction of glacier mass is observed in all glacier-covered regions in the world.  In this talk ,the glacier loss in Iceland is put into global context and projections for the future of the glaciers discussed in the light of the Paris agreement and our task of reducing global emissions of greenhouse gases. 

About the speaker:

Guðfinna Aðalgeirsdóttir is professor of Geophysics at the Institute of Earth Sciences, University of Iceland. Her work focuses on the interaction of climate and glaciers by monitoring and modelling the response of glaciers to climate change in the past, present and future. She previously worked on coupling ice sheet and climate models for the Greenland Ice Sheet at the Danish Meteorological Institute in Copenhagen, in order to improve sea level rise projections.  She studied geophysics and glaciology at University of Iceland, University of Alaska in Fairbanks and ETH in Zürich, Switzerland and has done field work in Iceland, Alaska, Switzerland, Greenland and two field seasons in Antarctica. Guðfinna is one of the lead authors of the upcoming 6th assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR6).