Dr. Grant Ferguson earns rare honour, paper chosen as AGU highlight
Dr. Grant Ferguson has once again been highlighted for his research expertise.
Just days after an article quoting his expert commentary appeared in Discovery News, the online news site for the Discovery Channel in the United States, the Earth Sciences professor and Environmental Sciences Research Centre (ESRC) researcher’s recent paper in Geophysical Research Letters was chosen as an American Geophysical Union highlight.
“This is an extremely rare honour,” says Earth Sciences chair Dr. Hugo Beltrami. “This is the seventh AGU highlight our department members have had in the last 10 years, and Grant's second.”
Dr. Ferguson’s article, Permafrost thaw may accelerate Arctic groundwater runoff, co-authored with Victor Bense of the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK and Henk Kooi of VU University in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, appears as a Dec. 31, 2009 AGU Journal highlight.
A summary of the article reads: “As the Arctic warms, permafrost will degrade, potentially resulting in increased groundwater runoff as frozen ground that had blocked the flow of water melts. To investigate how groundwater systems will evolve as surface temperatures rise, Bense et al. develop a model to simulate an idealized aquifer covered by a layer of permafrost. They ran the simulation under three scenarios, starting with three initial surface temperatures (–2, –1.5, and –1 degrees Celsius, or 28.4, 29.3 and 30.2 degrees Fahrenheit), corresponding to different permafrost thicknesses. In each case, they increased the average seasonal surface temperature by 3 degrees C (5.4 degrees F) over 100 years, an average of model predictions for temperature increase in the Arctic over the next century. After the warming period, in each scenario the temperature was then held constant for the next 1100 years. The authors find that although the initial distribution of ice influences the response, in all cases groundwater flow to streams and rivers accelerates over time. In fact, the results indicate that substantial increases in groundwater flow are likely over the next few centuries even if surface air temperatures stabilize at current levels.”