Conference: West Antarctic Ice Sheet Workshop 2024: A Transdisciplinary Forum for Initial International Polar Year Planning in West Antarctica

The West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Workshop has been held annually for the past three decades to provide a key venue for transdisciplinary scientific exchange on the state and behavior of WAIS and other marine-based ice-sheet basins, processes that influence their changing behavior, and projections of their future mass balance and sea-level contribution. The community-based structure of the workshops brings together students, early-career, and senior scientists who are investigating marine ice sheets using a wide variety of tools.

Researchers present findings obtained from ground-based and shipborne methods, airborne geophysics, satellite remote-sensing, and numerical modeling. Group interactions facilitate collaborations across institutions and disciplines and help researchers answer difficult, but essential, questions regarding the fate of the Earth’s marine ice-sheet basins. This award provides partial support for the 2024 WAIS Workshop in Gainesville, Florida,

At this workshop, the organizers will: (1) convene a workshop on innovative WAIS science, with extended time for discussion and audience interaction that is accessible to scientists and educators at all career stages in an effort to define the NSF community needs for the upcoming International Polar Year; (2) ensure a transdisciplinary perspective on WAIS evolution by welcoming new scientific ideas and inputs from other disciplines underrepresented in past WAIS Workshops (e.g., biology, oceanography, (geo)engineering, data science); (3) redesign the web-presence of the workshop to ensure the 30-year history of WAIS Workshops is maintained for understanding the context and evolution of marine ice-sheet science for future generations of NSF-funded scientists; and (4) engage scientists of all levels by implementing half-day post-agenda mini-workshops that support training in NSF-funded data repositories and open-science practices. They will continue successful programs to enhance equity and accessibility, such as blind-abstract review, synchronous streaming of the WAIS Workshop science agenda, and archiving videos of WAIS Workshop presentations for free public access to the latest marine ice-sheet science.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.