Collaborative Research: Connecting tidewater glacier fjord dynamics to iceberg habitat availability

Tidewater glacier fjords support rich ecosystems that are home to the smallest plankton up to marine mammals and birds and by extension, people. In Alaska and across the Arctic, tidewater glacier fjords are important habitats for harbor seals, a keystone species that depend on icebergs to give birth and raise their young. This project will combine field campaigns with modeling experiments to study how glacier and ocean processes effect iceberg habitat, improving our knowledge of how physical processes can cascade through fjord ecosystems across the Arctic. This project will provide training opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students, strengthen collaboration between universities and the National Park Service, and support science communication efforts to make new discoveries accessible to park managers, educators, and the approximately one million visitors to Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve each year. This interdisciplinary project will quantify the impacts of glacier and fjord processes on iceberg habitat, which is used by harbor seals across Arctic systems for critical life functions. The project will integrate glaciological and oceanographic field and remote sensing measurements to understand the interactions among glacier runoff, water temperature and salinity, iceberg distributions, and seal concentrations in Johns Hopkins Inlet, a fjord in Alaska that hosts an especially large population of seals. The investigators will use ocean models to explore how these processes may change as Johns Hopkins Glacier evolves. This project will advance knowledge of high-latitude marine ecosystems and develop a systems-based framework for glacier and fjord ecosystems across the Arctic. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.