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Welcome to the Enderlin Glaciology Group (EGG) website!

My research aims to advance our understanding of the varying sensitivity of glaciers to climate change so that society is able to prepare for, and hopefully mitigate/minimize, the impacts of glacier loss on the Earth system. My research projects focus on combining remotely-sensed and in situ observations and numerical ice flow modeling to develop a better understanding of controls on the flow of marine-terminating glaciers (i.e., glacier dynamics). I am particularly interested in glacier-ocean interactions, namely submarine melting and iceberg calving, and how changes in these interactions influence the rate of glacier mass loss. I completed my Ph.D. research under the supervision of Dr. Ian Howat (Glacier Dynamics Group, Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center) in 2013. From 2013-2018 I was research faculty at the University of Maine Climate Change Institute. I started a position as tenure-track faculty in the Department of Geosciences at Boise State University last January and I am working on building a glaciology research group to complement the seasonal snow hydrology and geophysics strengths of the department. Please contact me if you're interested in joining the Enderlin Glaciology Group and becoming an 'EGGhead'!

I am passionate about getting undergraduate students involved in research so that they leave college with the ability to conduct research and convey their research to the public. I am particularly interested in providing research opportunities to women and other under-represented populations in STEM fields since my undergraduate research experiences are what got me interested in glacier research. In line with my interests in mentoring to promote early-career scientists, I am currently an early-career representative to the Cryosphere Focus Group of the American Geophysical Union (AGU). If you have early-career concerns that you would like addressed by AGU, feel free to email me.

I also enjoy giving presentations on glaciers and climate change to middle and high school students (see Outreach tab). If you're a teacher looking for a guest speaker, please contact me!

EGGhead News

Spring 2019

I'll be posting more about Spring as activities arise. You can expect photos from graduate students Rainey Aberle & Kate Bollen's travels to Volcan Villarrica in Chile for fieldwork on the glacier-clad volcano, graduate student Colten Elkin's snow sampling short-course in New Hampshire, and graduate student Jukes Liu's International Arctic Science Committee workshop presentation in Obergurgl, Austria. I will also post bios for my two new undergraduates: Caitlin Oliver and Josh Schreiter.

FALL 2019

Check out the bios for all the new students in the Enderlin Glaciology Group (aka the EGGheads) under the Students tab! We have a diverse set of ongoing projects, ranging from the development of new methods to automatically map changes in glacier length, to assessing spatio-temporal patterns in mass loss from Greenland's peripheral glaciers, to modeling of the response of glaciers to ocean change inferred from satellite-derived iceberg melt rates, to quantifying spatial patterns in snow depth in the mountains using ICESat-2 laser altimeter data. Expect to see results from these research projects at conferences and publications in the next year or so!

If you want to get my advice on navigating your career and starting a family, check out my guest blog post for USAPECS https://usapecs.wixsite.com/usapecs/post/personal-and-professional-success-are-not-mutually-exclusive-by-ellyn-enderlin. I also recommend that you attend the USAPECS Career Development Panel on Monday, Dec. 9th, from 2-3pm in the Moscone South Career Center Theatre and the informal women in the cryosphere social at the Mikkeller Bar on Tuesday, Dec. 10th, at ~8pm (after the AGU Cryosphere Business Meeting and Reception). There will be tons of people at both events to provide diverse insights on early career issues.

It's a relatively light AGU year for my group but check out the following presentations if you're in San Francisco for the 2019 Fall Meeting, including my talk Monday at 5pm. Also, if you're early in your career and interested in things cold and snowy/icy, don't miss the USAPECS Career Development Panel on Monday, December 9th at 2pm in the Career Center Theatre in Moscone South. I'll be sitting on the panel this year, (hopefully) dishing out helpful advice on navigating a career path that may be a little more circuitous than you had planned and time management tips that have helped me stay happy and mostly sane as I've navigated academia and motherhood.

Fall 2018

New graduate student: The CCI Glaciology & CompuMAINE groups are happy to add Julia ("Jukes") Liu to our teams! Jukes will be developing an automated technique to map changes in glacier length over time using the Landsat image archive. Welcome Jukes!

Summer 2018

The UMaine Glaciology and CompuMAINE labs have paired-up on the NASA-funded project “Quantification and Analysis of Greenland Glacier and Ice Cap Discharge using Automated Landsat Terminus Change Time Series and NASA Data Products”. This is a joint project led by Dr. Ellyn Enderlin from the Climate Change Institute and School of Earth and Climate Sciences and Dr. Andre Khalil, founder and director of the CompuMAINE Lab. The CompuMAINE lab is collaborating with the Enderlin lab to develop an automated satellite image analysis procedure to help answer the questions below.

The overall aim of the proposed project is to quantify dynamic mass loss from Greenland’s peripheral glaciers and ice caps (GICs) over the last two decades and to assess variations in their ice discharge with respect to atmospheric and oceanic forcing. Two questions guide this work:

1) Has terminus retreat and/or ice flow acceleration substantially contributed to mass loss from Greenland’s GICs over the last two decades?

2) Do spatial and temporal patterns in Greenland GIC dynamics differ from the ice sheet’s outlet glaciers due to differences in their sensitivity to atmospheric and oceanic forcing?

Winter/Spring 2018

PAPERS! PAPERS! AND MORE PAPERS! If you are interested in learning about the use of remotely-sensed iceberg melt rates as a means to infer variations in ocean conditions in glacial fjords, check out my paper recently published in The Cryosphere: https://www.the-cryosphere.net/12/565/2018/. The iceberg melt data that my students and I produced for Greenland suggest that although ocean conditions in glacial fjords generally adhere to expected spatial patterns based on variations in regional air and ocean temperatures, differences in fjord geometry lead to deviations from expected patterns: long fjords packed with icebergs have lower melt rates than fjords where icebergs are rapidly transported to the open ocean. Whether these variations are due to differences in water temperature or circulation between fjords is an area of future interest.

Masters student Will Kochtitzky also recently had his undergraduate thesis work published in the Journal of Glaciology: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-glaciology/article/improved-estimates-of-glacier-change-rates-at-nevado-coropuna-ice-cap-peru/AE2C29B25C4757967B2C6CEB8C918C33. Congrats Will! He mapped glacier change at the Coropuna Ice Cap in Peru using Landsat satellite images.

I also have a paper on variations in controls on mass loss from Columbia Glacier in Alaska at seasonal to inter-annual time scales that is under review at the Journal of Geophysical Research: Earth Surface. Check back for updates on the publication of these papers and more!

Fall 2017

New graduate student: The CCI Glaciology group is happy to add Mariama Dryak to our team! Mariama is TAing this year and will also be assisting with research on Antarctic iceberg melting. Mariama will be using very high-resolution satellite images to estimate iceberg melt rates around Antarctica and (hopefully) link melt rate variations in space and time to changes in ocean conditions and melting beneath Antarctica's ice shelves. Welcome Mariama!

Winter 2017

New Project on Antarctic Icebergs: Starting in June, I will be expanding the scope of my research on iceberg melting as part of an NSF-funded project titled "Antarctic Submarine Melt Variability from Remote Sensing of Icebergs". The project will compare spatial and temporal variations in iceberg melt rates, obtained using repeat very-high resolution (~0.5 m pixel width) satellite images, with variations in ice shelf thinning and ocean forcing. The major objectives of the project are to determine whether (1) differences in iceberg melting can be used as a proxy for variations in melting of Antarctica's ice shelves and (2) current ocean models are capable of simulating changes in ocean forcing, which have important implications for our ability to accurately predict future changes in Antarctic ice shelf stability.

Fall 2016

UMaine Glaciology in the News! Check-out the press release issued by the American Geophysical Union on iceberg melting in Greenland's glacial fjords: http://news.agu.org/press-release/most-meltwater-in-greenland-fjords-likely-comes-from-icebergs-not-glaciers/

New undergraduate research assistant: Time-lapse photos of glaciers and glacial fjords, like those featured in the movie "Chasing Ice", provide the opportunity to observe rapid changes in ice-ocean interactions. Undergraduate Mike Driscoll is currently working with time-lapse photos from Helheim Glacier in SE Greenland (see real-time photos here: http://glacierresearch.org/realtime-images.html) to characterize changes in iceberg calving. These data will be used to quantify iceberg calving volumes, which will be compared to glacier stress time series in order to assess the glacier's sensitivity to changes in terminus position.

New graduate student: The CCI Glaciology group is happy to add a new graduate student, Will Kochtitzky. Will is assisting with research on my Greenland iceberg melting project: he is extracting iceberg meltwater flux and melt rate estimates for ~6 fjords in Greenland using very high-resolution satellite images. Welcome Will!

Spring 2016

Undergraduate Research: Undergraduate research assistant and UMaine junior, Caroline Carrigan, presented her research results on iceberg melting at the UMaine Center for Undergraduate Research symposium. This was Caroline's first scientific poster! She presented her preliminary results on submarine melting for icebergs calved from Alison Glacier in NW Greenland and Zachariae Isstrom in NE Greenland. She's found that 2011 iceberg melt rates were similar in both locations, with an average of ~0.04 m/d and no significant seasonal variations. She'll be expanding her datasets to investigate seasonal and inter-annual variations in iceberg submarine melting near these two glaciers during her senior year at UMaine.