Nina Kirchner

I am associate professor of glaciology at Stockholm University, and Co-Leader of the Bolin Centre for Climate Research (Research Area 6: Orbital to tectonic climate variability). I am also a regular guest lecturer at the Department of Arctic Geology at the University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS). Since January 2015, I am affiliated to the KTH Centre of Naval Architecture.

My overall research interest concerns ice sheets and the polar oceans. On the ice-side, I study ice sheets, ice streams, and ice shelves. The tools I use are numerical models, which I develop together with colleagues from scientific computing. On the ocean-side, I study the seafloor adjacent to existing ice sheets and ice sheets that have vanished, in collaboration with marine geologists. The tools we use are ship mounted acoustic instruments, e.g. multibeam echosounders. The fun part comes when putting pieces together, in order to learn about ice-ocean interaction, its role and relevance for the global climate system (see e.g. the FROZEN project) .

My involvement with the Centre of Naval Architecture stems from a shared research interest in Autonomous Underwater Vehicles: These are needed to study some of the least explored and most remote and hostile environments on Earth: the cavities below large floating ice shelf and glacier tongues fringing the Antarctic Ice Sheet and the Greenland Ice Sheet. In order to contribute to advancing this challenging research field, I serve on the steering committee of the MUST project. MUST is dedicated to establishing a national infrastructure for the use of large AUVs for use in especially polar marine research, and is supported by the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation. MUST is currently purchasing an AUV with under-ice going capacity, with first test missions planned for the winter 2016/2017.