Community-scale changes to landfast ice along the coast of Alaska over 2000-2022

Dr. Sarah Cooley is an Assistant Professor of Planetary Health in the Division of Earth and Climate Sciences at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke. As PI of the Cryo-hydrO Observation Leaders (COOL) Lab at Duke, her research group investigates how climate change is affecting dynamic cryospheric and hydrologic processes in the Arctic and globally. Her research primarily uses satellite data to better understand fine-scale hydrologic change, but she has also conducted field multiple field campaigns in Alaska, Northern Canada, and Greenland. Her primary research focus areas include Northern surface water dynamics, Arctic coastal environmental change and its impact on communities, and global variability in surface water storage. She is also especially interested in how new technologies and big data approaches can revolutionize our ability to observe surface water from space, and she has worked extensively with both new NASA satellites (e.g. ICESat-2, SWOT) and startup commercial earth observation companies (e.g. Planet, ICEYE).

Sarah received her PhD in Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences at Brown University in 2020. She has an MPhil in Polar Studies from the University of Cambridge where she was a Gates Cambridge Scholar and a BS in Geophysics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she was a Morehead-Cain Scholar. Prior to starting at Duke, she was part of the inaugural cohort of Stanford Science Fellows at Stanford from 2020-2021 and was an Assistant Professor of Geography at the University of Oregon from 2021-2024. Sarah is especially passionate about all things Arctic, new satellite technologies, and making academia a more accessible, inclusive and healthy place for all. 

Dr. Jonathan “Johnny” Ryan is a glaciologist who is interested in ice sheet surface processes. His research has investigated several key components that influence the accumulation and ablation of ice sheets, including snowfall, clouds, melt-albedo feedbacks, and supraglacial hydrology. To conduct this research, Johnny primarily relies on satellite remote sensing. This expertise has earned him selection onto NASA’s ICESat-2 and Terra/Aqua/Suomi Science Teams. Johnny also conducts field research and has spent many summers surveying ice sheets and glaciers with uncrewed aerial systems (UAS) or drones. His primary research site is the Greenland Ice Sheet, where he has worked out of Kangerlussuaq and Uummannaq. He has also conducted research on the Northern Patagonia Icefield and the Oregon Cascades. By combining fieldwork with new satellite remote sensing technology, Johnny’s research bridges spatial and temporal scales to generate new insights into ice sheet surface processes. The significance of his research is reflected by recent first- and second-author publications in journals such as Nature, Environmental Research Letters, Science Advances, Nature Communications, and Geophysical Research Letters.