PhD student in physical geography with focus on the future of the Greenland Ice Sheet

PhD student in physical geography with focus on the future of the Greenland Ice Sheet

Are you interested in studying mass changes of the Greenland Ice Sheet, with the support of competent and friendly colleagues in an international environment? Are you looking for an employer that invests in sustainable employeeship and offers safe, favorable working conditions? We welcome you to apply for a PhD position at Uppsala University.

The Department of Earth Sciences at Uppsala University is Sweden´s largest and most versatile department of its kind. The department has approximately 280 employees. Our activities are interdisciplinary and combine natural science and technology with social science. We have research programs in air, water and landscape science; geophysics; natural resources and sustainable development; petrology, mineralogy and tectonics; paleobiology, and wind energy. By investigating the history of Earth, we understand how our planet has developed over time and how sustainable development benefits from this knowledge.

The announced position is in the research program Air, Water and Landscape Science (LUVAL) which brings together research and education in hydrology, meteorology, environmental analysis and physical geography. The research in physical geography has a main interest in cold environments, with a primary focus on glaciological topics, but also other aspects of the cryosphere.

Duties
The PhD student will work in a project funded by the Swedish National Space Agency, with the main aim to generate new bed height and thickness maps for the Greenland Ice Sheet, and to simulate the evolution of the ice sheet up to 2300. To achieve this, a novel, fast and versatile inverse approach will be used that infers present-day bed topography under the ice, and simultaneously provides initial conditions for prognostic modelling. After recent applications on mountain glaciers in the Arctic and sub-Arctic (see e.g. Frank and Van Pelt, 2024; Van Pelt and Frank, 2025), and an ongoing application to all mountain glaciers on Earth, in this project the method will be optimized for use on the larger Greenland Ice Sheet, while making use of the newest high-resolution satellite data products. To speed up ice flow modelling, a new machine-learning based ice-flow emulator will be trained with input and output data from the Parallel Ice Sheet Model (PISM). This ultimately allows modelling the present and future of the ice sheet with unprecedented spatial detail and reduced model uncertainty, thereby contributing to reduced uncertainty in sea level rise predictions for a range of future emission scenarios.

The project will include collaboration with Oslo University, Mid Sweden University, the Danish Meteorological Institute, University of Liège, and the University of Fairbanks. There is potential for the PhD student to participate in glaciological field work.

Requirements
To meet the entry requirements for doctoral studies, you must

• hold a Master’s (second-cycle) degree in glaciology, Earth Sciences, computer science, physics, or similar, or
• have completed at least 240 credits in higher education, with at least 60 credits at Master’s level including an independent project worth at least 15 credits, or
• have acquired substantially equivalent knowledge in some other way.

Previous experience with modelling/analysis of the cryosphere, preferably glaciers, is a requirement. The candidate is required to be able to communicate easily in oral and written English, work independently and in an international team of researchers with different disciplinary backgrounds.

Additional qualifications
Experience with machine learning, numerical modelling, and programming skills in Python or similar are valued. Furthermore, familiarity with spatial analysis software (e.g. ArcGIS) is a merit.

Rules governing PhD students are set out in the Higher Education Ordinance chapter 5, §§ 1-7 and in Uppsala University's rules and guidelines.

About the employment
The employment is a temporary position according to the Higher Education Ordinance chapter 5 § 7. Scope of employment 100 %. Starting date 15-08-2025 or as agreed. Placement: Uppsala

For further information about the position, please contact: Ward van Pelt, ward.van.pelt@geo.uu.se

Please submit your application by 25 April 2025, UFV-PA 2025/786.

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