The rise in global mean sea level (GMSL) is an immediate threat to coastal communities around the world. The Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS), vulnerable to increased warming in the Arctic, is expected to contribute largely to GMSL rise within this century through surface melt runoff and the retreat of its marine-terminating glaciers. Though mass loss from the GrIS will cause GMSL rise in coming years, glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) will lead to regional sea-level fall around Greenland as the land rebounds and the gravitational attraction of water towards the ice sheet is reduced. In this project, we use a suite of GIA models to predict future sea-level change in this region. We model the GIA contribution from ice sheet change over two time periods: the deglaciation (~30ka – 1ka) and historical to future (1ka to 2100). We use a Bayesian approach to constrain our model predictions with data of vertical land motion from 57 GPS stations and obtain posterior estimates of regional sea-level change under different emission scenarios. These predictions can be used to gain insight into how sea-level change will impact the natural environment, infrastructure, and economy around Greenland.

Lauren Lewright is a PhD candidate at Columbia University studying interactions between the solid earth and the cryosphere over different timescales. She received her bachelor's degree in Geophysics from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where her proximity to both the ocean and mountains fostered her curiosity in the earth sciences. She is committed to working towards a more diverse and equitable setting at both her current institution and in the field as a whole, and her involvement in the graduate student council and the Department of Earth and Environmental Science’s DEI committee is in pursuit of this goal. In her free time, she enjoys reading, going on runs through New York cities many parks, and playing with her cats.