A local ice flow model to interpret the Beyond EPICA ice core

5 months, February to June

Understanding how ice flows in East Antarctica is of uppermost importance to determine the distribution of age with depth for deep ice cores, to determine potential future drilling sites or improve the ice-dynamic context of a chosen site to support the correct interpretation of ice-core climate proxies. One of the most important application is to produce the depth vs age relationship, hence the first age model, for the Beyond EPICA ice core. Hence, this study will concentrate on the wider Dome C area. However, the methodological results of this project can also be applied to other deep drilling targets, as proposed under the IPICS umbrella (http://pastglobalchanges.org/science/end-aff/ipics/intro).
Beyond EPICA is a Horizon Europe project will 10 nations involved which successfully drilled a 2800 m ice core. The paleoclimatic record, which is expected to exceed 1.2 million years, will shed a new light on the Mid-Pleistocene Transition (MPT), a climatic transition which occurred around 1 million years ago, during which the large 100 kyr glacial cycles appeared.
The candidate will improve on existing ice flow modeling works, either 1D, that is, considering only vertical displacement of ice (Chung et al., 2023 ; Parrenin et al., 2017) or 2.5D, that is, considering a flow tube and horizontal advection of ice layers (Chung et al., 2024 ; Parrenin et al., 2025). The novelty of the work will be to improve the representation of basal processes in the model. While previous works were considering a “mechanical” ice thickness and inferring basal melting from it, we will here directly infer basal melting at the ice-bedrock interface observed by radio-echo sounding. This new parametrisation is expected to give a more accurate estimate of basal melting and of basal age.
The candidate must have a keen interest and solid knowledge in glaciological/physical sciences with a curriculum in physics, mathematics, climate science, geophysics or a related field. A good experience in Python programming will be appreciated.

Références
Chung, A., Parrenin, F., Steinhage, D., Mulvaney, R., Martín, C., Cavitte, M. G. P., Lilien, D. A., Helm, V., Taylor, D., Gogineni, P., Ritz, C., Frezzotti, M., O’Neill, C., Miller, H., Dahl-Jensen, D., and Eisen, O. : Stagnant ice and age modelling in the Dome C region, Antarctica, The Cryosphere, 17, 3461–3483, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-17-3461-2023, 2023.
Chung, A., Parrenin, F., Mulvaney, R., Vittuari, L., Frezzotti, M., Zanutta, A., Lilien, D. A., Cavitte, M. G. P., and Eisen, O. : Age, thinning and spatial origin of the Beyond EPICA ice from a 2.5D ice flow model, EGUsphere, 1–21, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-1650, 2024.
Parrenin, F., Cavitte, M. G. P., Blankenship, D. D., Chappellaz, J., Fischer, H., Gagliardini, O., Masson-Delmotte, V., Passalacqua, O., Ritz, C., Roberts, J., Siegert, M. J., and Young, D. A. : Is there 1.5-million-year-old ice near Dome C, Antarctica ?, The Cryosphere, 11, 2427–2437, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-11-2427-2017, 2017.
Parrenin, F., Chung, A., and Martín, C. : age_flow_line-1.0 : a fast and accurate numerical age model for a pseudo-steady flow tube of an ice sheet, EGUsphere, 1–25, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-2024-3411, 2025.