UND’s Anjali Sandip receives NSF grant to study melting glaciers

Collaborative effort with Dartmouth College seeks to develop high-resolution, 3D computer models of Antarctic glaciers

Anjali Sandip, a senior lecturer in UND’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, has received a National Science Foundation grant that will help her and her colleagues study the impact on sea levels of melting Antarctic ice sheets.

The $286,102 grant will be funded over a period of about two years. In addition to being assisted by a graduate student, Sandip will collaborate with researchers from Dartmouth College on the project.

Sandip said the research will tackle a real-world problem while at the same time, giving her invaluable experience.

“The NSF support will help me apply my experience in numerical modeling, fluid dynamics and parallel computing toward one of the greatest threats our planet faces today: climate change,” she said.

Sandip said her research is particularly salient, given that “the global mean sea level is rising at an average rate of 3.7 millimeters per year, posing a significant threat to coastal communities and global ecosystems.”

The primary objective of the research, she added, is to develop high-resolution, three-dimensional computer models of Antarctic glaciers, which then can be used to assess the glaciers’ sea-level contribution at various levels of climate change. This practice has been previously impossible due to “computational costs,” Sandip said.

The researchers at Dartmouth will create the models to simulate ice-loss predictions. Sandip will lead the development of the algorithms that will enable those simulations to be run.