The great melting: how small things affect global processes

UK Centre for Astrobiology seminar

[CANCELLED] The great melting: how small things affect global processes

  • Event time: 1:30pm
  • Event date: 6th February 2018
  • Speaker: Professor Liane Benning (GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences)
  • Location: CSEC Seminar Room,

Event details

The melting of snow and ice on Earth or elsewhere today, in the past and in the future are controlled by changes in snow and ice surface albedo. I will discuss why and how snow and ice melt, why melting on Earth today accelerates at an alarming rate and what the causes and consequences of this are. I will show how the balance between snow physics, mineral properties, black carbon and extremophile microbial processs affect melting and show how variations in diversity, function and metabolic activity of snow and ice algae and properties of soot and mineral dust affect albedo in the  highly dynamic snow-ice transition zones. Finally, I will discuss how we work towards upscaling our ground based geo-bio findings through satellite data and ice sheet modelling and how we can parameterise ground-based water-mineral-microbe observations in these extreme environments and link them to global scale processes. 

About UK Centre for Astrobiology seminars

The astrobiology seminar series is run by the UK Centre for Astrobiology based in the School of Physics & Astronomy. Astrobiology is a multi-disciplinary subject and the seminar series actively encourages attendance by undergraduates, postgraduates and academic staff from other departments..

Find out more about UK Centre for Astrobiology seminars.