Eric Rignot
Distinguished Professor and Chair, Earth System Science | UC Irvine
Irvine, CA, UNITED STATES
Dr. Rignot works to understand the interactions of glaciers and climate and what effects they will have on global sea levels.
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Biography
Dr. Rignot works to understand the interactions of ice and climate, in particular to determine how the ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland will respond to climate change in the coming century and how they will affect global sea level.
He uses satellite remote sensing techniques (imaging radar, laser altimetry, radio echo sounding), airborne geophysical surveys (icebridge), field surveys (radar, GPS, bathymetry, CTD), and numerical modeling (ice sheet motion, ocean circulation near glaciers, coupled ocean/ice sheet models).
In addition, he is an expert in how ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland will respond to climate change, interactions of ice and climate, global sea level, satellite remote sensing and ocean circulation.
Areas of Expertise (4)
Ice Sheet Dynamics and Mass Balance
Climate Change
Glaciology
Radar
Accomplishments (4)
2017 Louis Agassiz Medal
Awarded to Eric Rignot for fundamental innovations in the remote sensing of glacier flow, leading to the first assessments of the mass balance of the ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland.
NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal
2012.
Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher
2014.
2007 Nobel Peace Prize (Contributing Author)
Co-author IPCC AR4.
Education (5)
Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris VI): Master's Degree, Astronomy and Astrophysics 1987
Ecole Centrale Paris: Engineer's Degree, Aerospace Engineering 1985
University of Southern California: Ph.D., Aerospace, Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering 1988
University of Southern California: Master's Degree, Electrical, Electronics and Communications Engineering 1988
University of Southern California: Ph.D. and E.E., Electrical Engineering and Aeronautical Engineering 1991
Affiliations (2)
- NASA
- JPL
Links (1)
Media Appearances (8)
Thwaites Glacier gets a 'daily bath of warm water' melting inland ice miles past the grounding line.
Daily Kos online
2024-07-14
Although the glacier has only been studied since 2018, satellite and radar data have provided valuable information critical to understanding the worrying potential sea level rise on the world's coastlines. ... Satellites can see only the surface of the ice, but because the ice is compacted, tiny vertical movements signal that the glacier bed must be rising too, wrote Eric Rignot in an email. Rignot is a glaciologist at the University of California, Irvine, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and first author of the study.
Faster ice sheet melting could bring more coastal flooding sooner
USA Today online
2024-06-25
Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at the University of California, Irvine, told USA TODAY there's much more seawater flowing into the glacier than previously thought and it makes the glacier "more sensitive to ocean warming, and more likely to fall apart as the ocean gets warmer." … "These and other studies pointing at a greater sensitivity of the glacier to warm water means that sea level rise this coming century will be much larger than anticipated, and possibly up to twice larger," Rignot said.
Scientists identify new Antarctic ice sheet ‘tipping point,’ warning future sea level rise may be underestimated
CNN online
2024-06-25
Eric Rignot, professor of Earth system science at the University of California at Irvine, who was not involved in the research, told CNN the study “encourages us to take a closer look at physical processes taking place in grounding zones.” “But this is a very complex, poorly observed region and a lot more research and field observations are needed,” he cautioned, including establishing what processes control the intrusion of ocean water beneath the ice and exactly how this affects the ice melting.
The Doomsday Glacier in Antarctica is melting faster than scientists thought
USA Today online
2024-05-20
Study lead author Eric Rignot of the University of California, Irvine told USA TODAY that there's much more seawater flowing into the glacier than had been previously thought. These "intrusions make the glacier more sensitive to ocean warming, and more likely to fall apart as the ocean gets warmer."
This ‘doomsday’ glacier is more vulnerable than scientists once thought
The Washington Post online
2024-05-20
“The water is able to penetrate beneath the ice over much longer distances than we thought,” said Eric Rignot, a scientist with the University of California, Irvine and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who led the research. “It’s kind of sending a shock wave down our spine to see that water moving kilometers.” .... The new study was published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Authors work at the University of California at Irvine, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, Waterloo University in Canada, and the Finnish firm ICEYE, which provided the satellite observations.
Extreme Ice Sheet Retreat
Medium online
2024-03-03
Inside Climate News: “Global warming could drive pulses of ice sheet retreat reaching 2,000 feet per day.” … This is scarily up to 20 times faster than anything previously measured, except for a similar study by ‘Eric Rignot, a glaciologist at the University of California, Irvine and Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who was not involved in the new research but has measured accelerating ice sheet retreat around Antarctica with his own research.’
New research pinpoints Antarctica's melty past. Scientists warn it's happening again
Salon online
2024-02-14
Dr. Eric Rignot from the University of California, Irvine's Department of Earth System Science also told Salon … it "is important to know to establish some boundaries on how fast an ice sheet can melt away in a changing climate. In this study, the authors report 270 km of retreat in 400 years, or 0.7 [kilometers per year], which is within the range of what we observe today in some rapidly changing sectors of Antarctica and Greenland." … "This study among other things shows that we are experiencing very significant changes in Antarctica right now and need to take it seriously," Rignot said.
Did an Ancient Civilization Ever Live in Antarctica?
Discover Magazine online
2024-01-15
Back in 2016, an unnamed pyramid-shaped mountain in Antarctica went viral with some Internet users claiming that it must be a relic of a bygone civilization. … Most mountains are made up of different rock types, which erode at different rates to create an irregular shape. “It suggests, since it came out so evenly, that the rock type is fairly uniform,” Eric Rignot, a professor of Earth system science at the University of California, Irvine, told Live Science. “This is just a mountain that looks like a pyramid.”
Articles (3)
Ice flow modelling to constrain the surface mass balance and ice discharge of San Rafael Glacier, Northern Patagonia Icefield
Journal of GlaciologyGabriella Collao-Barrios, Fabien Gillet-Chaulet, Vincent Favier, Gino Casassa Etienne Berthier, Ines Dussaillant, Jeremie Mouginot, Eric Rignot
2018 We simulate the ice dynamics of the San Rafael Glacier (SRG) in the Northern Patagonia Icefield (46.7°S, 73.5°W), using glacier geometry obtained by airborne gravity measurements. The full-Stokes ice flow model (Elmer/Ice) is initialized using an inverse method to infer the basal friction coefficient from a satellite-derived surface velocity mosaic. The high surface velocities (7.6 km a ⁻¹ ) near the glacier front are explained by low basal shear stresses (1 km a ⁻¹ ). We force the model using different surface mass-balance scenarios taken or adapted from previous studies and geodetic elevation changes between 2000 and 2012. Our results suggest that previous estimates of average surface mass balance over the entire glacier ( Ḃ ) were likely too high, mainly due to an overestimation in the accumulation area. We propose that most of SRG imbalance is due to the large ice discharge (−0.83 ± 0.08 Gt a ⁻¹ ) and a slightly positive Ḃ (0.08 ± 0.06 Gt a ⁻¹ ). The committed mass-loss estimate over the next century is −0.34 ± 0.03 Gt a ⁻¹ . This study demonstrates that surface mass-balance estimates and glacier wastage projections can be improved using a physically based ice flow model.
Mass balance of the Antarctic Ice Sheet from 1992 to 2017
NatureAndrew Shepherd, Erik R. Ivins, Eric Rignot, Bert Wouters et al.
2018 The Antarctic Ice Sheet is an important indicator of climate change and driver of sea-level rise. Here we combine satellite observations of its changing volume, flow and gravitational attraction with modelling of its surface mass balance to show that it lost 2,720 ± 1,390 billion tonnes of ice between 1992 and 2017, which corresponds to an increase in mean sea level of 7.6 ± 3.9 millimetres (errors are one standard deviation). Over this period, ocean-driven melting has caused rates of ice loss from West Antarctica to increase from 53 ± 29 billion to 159 ± 26 billion tonnes per year; ice-shelf collapse has increased the rate of ice loss from the Antarctic Peninsula from 7 ± 13 billion to 33 ± 16 billion tonnes per year. We find large variations in and among model estimates of surface mass balance and glacial isostatic adjustment for East Antarctica, with its average rate of mass gain over the period 1992–2017 (5 ± 46 billion tonnes per year) being the least certain.
Intercomparison and Validation of SAR-Based Ice Velocity Measurement Techniques within the Greenland Ice Sheet CCI Project
Remote SensingJohn Peter Merryman Boncori, Morten Langer Andersen, Jørgen Dall, Anders Kusk, Eric Rignot et al.
2018 Ice velocity is one of the products associated with the Ice Sheets Essential Climate Variable. This paper describes the intercomparison and validation of ice-velocity measurements carried out by several international research groups within the European Space Agency Greenland Ice Sheet Climate Change Initiative project, based on space-borne Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) data. The goal of this activity was to survey the best SAR-based measurement and error characterization approaches currently in practice. To this end, four experiments were carried out, related to different processing techniques and scenarios, namely differential SAR interferometry, multi aperture SAR interferometry and offset-tracking of incoherent as well as of partially-coherent data. For each task, participants were provided with common datasets covering areas located on the Greenland ice-sheet margin and asked to provide mean velocity maps, quality characterization and a description of processing algorithms and parameters. The results were then intercompared and validated against GPS data, revealing in several cases significant differences in terms of coverage and accuracy. The algorithmic steps and parameters influencing the coverage, accuracy and spatial resolution of the measurements are discussed in detail for each technique, as well as the consistency between quality parameters and validation results. This allows several recommendations to be formulated, in particular concerning procedures which can reduce the impact of analyst decisions, and which are often found to be the cause of sub-optimal algorithm performance.
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