The Geoscience Colloquium is hosted by the Department of Earth and Environmental Science each Friday.
Rebecca Jackson, PhD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Earth & Climate Sciences (with a secondary appointment in Civil & Environmental Engineering) at Tufts University. Prior to Tufts, she was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Marine & Coastal Sciences at Rutgers, and before that a NOAA Climate and Global Change postdoc fellow at Oregon State University.
Her research focuses on ocean-glacier interactions, coastal dynamics, and polar processes. Broadly, she is interested in how heat and freshwater are exchanged between the ocean and cryosphere, and her lab explore these dynamics across a range of scales, from the ocean-ice boundary layer to the continental shelf ocean.
The Polar Coastal Dynamics Lab at Tufts focuses on interactions between the ocean and cryosphere, coastal dynamics, and polar processes. The shrinking ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are a significant and growing contributor to sea level rise, yet our ability to predict sea level is hampered by a limited understanding of ocean-glacier interactions. Ocean warming has been implicated as a driver of glacier acceleration and retreat, with enhanced submarine melting as the presumed connection. However, we have almost no direct measurements of this melting and only a nascent understanding of ocean dynamics near glaciers. Both directions of ocean-glacier interactions are of interest: how does the ocean drive submarine melting and glacier retreat, and how does freshwater discharge from glaciers and ice sheets affect ocean circulation? The Jackson Group explores these questions across a range of scales – from the ocean-ice boundary layer to the regional circulation around Greenland – through the integration of observations, theory, and modeling.