With the guidance from Professor Colin Meyer at Dartmouth’s Ice Fluid Dynamics Lab, I am developing a model of the thawing process of permafrost. Permafrost is a layer of frozen water and sediments near the surface of the Earth. As global warming increases average temperatures across the globe, permafrost becomes susceptible to thawing into features called thermokarsts.
These thawing processes are important to understand because permafrost traps methane gas underneath the surface. When permafrost thaws, it can create pathways for methane to escape into the atmosphere, which can contribute to a positive feedback loop in global warming.
To adequately model this behavior, we use a system of coupled PDEs, solved numerically using the finite volume method.