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Special notification: Starting with this colloquium, the fika will be served in the "ljusgården" on floor 4, close to the eastern entrance, at 14:45.
Abstract: The Greenland Ice Sheet is reacting to climate change, and is losing progressively more mass every year. One of our challenges in the future is to adapt to rising sea level. Looking into the past provides knowledge on how the ice sheets react to changing climate, and this can be used to improve future predictions of sea level rise. The deep ice cores from Greenland contain information on past climate that goes back more than 130,000 years, telling tales about past abrupt climate and sea level changes.
The last interglacial, 130,000 to 115,000 years before present, is a key analogue for future climate. At this time, climate was 5^o C warmer over Greenland, and global sea level was 6-9 m higher than present.All the ice cores from Greenland show that the ice sheet survived, making only a modest contribution to global sea level rise of approximately 2m at this time.
Biography: Dorthe Dahl-Jensen received her PhD in Geophysics in 1988 from the University of Copenhagen. After a post-doc position at the University of Melbourne, she became an assistant professor at the University of Hobart in Tasmania, and moved back to the University of Copenhagen in 1997 as associate professor, where she is a full professor since 2002. Since 2019, she is also the Canada Excellence Research Chair at the University of Manitoba.
Dahl-Jensen received numerous distinctions, including the EU Descartes Prize (2008), the Vega medal (2008), the Amalienborgprisen (2009), the Munch prisen (2009), the Louis Agassiz Medal (2014), the Rossby price (2020), and the Balzan Prize (2022). She is a Member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters since 2015.
Dahl-Jensen has made important contributions to the study of ice and climate, specifically the reconstruction of climate records from ice cores and borehole data, including ice in the solar system and the history and evolution of the Greenland Ice Sheet. She led the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling (NEEM) project, which involved a 14-nation research team which spent four years drilling and analyzing a 2,540 m (8,330 ft) ice core reaching back to the last interglacial period 130–113 thousand years ago. They found that arctic ice melting was a significant factor. Large-scale melting of the Greenland ice sheet has long-term global consequences, beyond rising sea levels. It could halt the Gulf Stream ocean current, with potential knock-on effects on the Amazon rainforest and tropical monsoons.
Welcome!
Best regards,
The colloquium committee
Ariel Goobar (SU, Oskar Klein Center) ariel@fysik.su.se
Axel Brandenburg (NORDITA) brandenb@nordita.org
Egor Babaev (KTH, Condensed Matter Theory) babaev@kth.se
Eva Lindroth (SU, Atomic Physics) eva.lindroth@fysik.su.se
Fawad Hassan (SU, CoPS) fawad@fysik.su.se
Karin Lind (SU, Astronomy) karin.lind@astro.su.se
Markus Hennrich (SU, KOMKO) markus.hennrich@fysik.su.se