The response of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to a changing climate is one of the largest sources of uncertainty in future sea level predictions.  The behaviour of the subglacial environment, where ice meets hard rock or soft sediment, is a key determinant in the flux of ice towards the ocean, and hence the loss of ice over time.  Predicting how ice sheets respond on a range of timescales brings together mathematical models of the elastic and viscous response of the ice, subglacial sediment and water and is a rich playground where the simplified models of the contact between ice, rock and ocean can shed light on very large scale questions.  In this talk we’ll see how these simplified models can make sense of a variety of field and laboratory data in order to understand the dynamical phenomena controlling the transient response of large ice sheets.

 

The Hilbert scheme of d-points on a smooth surface is a well-studied object that still enjoys relatively large interest. We generalize Aldo Conca's Canonical Hilbert-Burch matrices and obtain explicit families of d-points. We show that such descriptions give us Białynicki-Birula cells of the Hilbert scheme for any choice of one-dimensional torus, thus describing the punctual component. This can be potentially applied to the study of singularities of the nested Hilbert scheme of points.