Ella Wood

Active research projects:

Hydrologic relevance and climate response of rock glaciers in mountain permafrost environments

Availability of water is one of the most important factors for population health, ecosystem functioning and sustainable development. Mountains are Earth’s fundamental water towers, providing water to densely populated lowlands well beyond their immediate downstream areas. While the knowledge about snow and glacier melt and related runoff significantly improved during the last years the contribution of ice stored in rock glaciers is largely unknown despite the potentially high importance. This project aims therefore to reduce the knowledge gap and to improve our knowledge about rock glacier occurrence, their ice volume and their climate response. This will be done by a holistic approach combining multi-scale and multi-temporal remote sensing (using both UAV and satellite data acquisitions) and geophysical field investigations (e.g. using ground penetrating radar and geoelectric). The project will concentrate on selected catchments in the Tien Shan (Central Asia) where ice melt is of great importance for the local population and rock glaciers are abundant. It is therefore expected that the candidate is willing to perform joint field work in South-East Kazakhstan.