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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Alex Robel in AntarcticaGlaciers flowing into the sea will somewhere lose contact with the bedrock underneath and start to float on the ocean. That location, called the grounding line, depends sensitively on the ice thickness; so too does the rate of ice flow. And if the bedrock slopes inward, away from the ocean, positive feedback between those dependencies produces the so-called marine ice-sheet instability: An inward fluctuation of the grounding line triggers an accelerating—and potentially unstoppable—retreat of the ice sheet that raises global sea levels precipitously. Alexander Robel (Georgia Tech) and colleagues have developed a framework to understand how the dynamics associated with the marine ice-sheet instability amplify the uncertainty in predictions of future sea-level rise. Robel is an assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.
