EES Guest Speaker - Dr. Mike Willis

Navigating the New Arctic: The Greenland Hazards Project

Note from Dr. Mike Willis:

"I will talk about the Greenland Hazards project, which is a partnership between US and Greenlandic groups to examine climate driven evolving hazards around Kalaallit Nunaat/Greenland. We’re using a combination of remote sensing, in-situ instrumentation, and community engagement to focus on geophysical problems relevant to the communities around Kalaallit Nunaat. We are in the second year of our five-year project and are concentrating on hazards in and around the capital, Nuuk and the area of southern Avannaata municipality that includes the Uummannaq Bay region. Ongoing work highlights the crucial need to partner with residents, provide capacity building, and the need to listen and respond to community needs. We are using radar and optical remote sensing to examine fjord wall stability during changing permafrost conditions that may lead to landslides and are experimenting with in place GNSS-IR systems to monitor waves produced by landslides and rolling icebergs. We are expanding our remote sensing effort to examine stability of newly built, critical infrastructure while also keeping nascent hazards under observation. We will show some of our initial results from the project and talk about new rules being instituted by the Greenland home rule government that will affect the way research is undertaken in the country."

 

Join us this Friday, September 1, 2023 at 12:30pm in room 204 Nat Sci to learn more!