My talk will attempt to capture the imperfect state of the art in high-resolution ice sheet modelling, aiming to expose the core performance-limiting issues.  The essential equations for modeling ice flow in a changing climate will be presented, assuming no prior knowledge of the problem.  These geophysical/climate problems are of both free-boundary and algebraic-equation-constrained character.  Current-technology models usually solve non-linear Stokes equations, or approximations thereof, at every explicit time-step.  Scale analysis shows why this current design paradigm is expensive, but building significantly faster high-resolution ice sheet models requires new techniques.  I'll survey some recently-arrived tools, some near-term improvements, and sketch some new ideas.

I will explain that all affine isometric actions of higher rank simple Lie groups and their lattices on arbitrary uniformly convex Banach spaces have a fixed point. This vastly generalises a recent breakthrough of Oppenheim. Combined with earlier work of Lafforgue and of Liao on strong Banach property (T) for non-Archimedean higher rank simple groups, this confirms a long-standing conjecture of Bader, Furman, Gelander and Monod. As a consequence, we deduce that box space expanders constructed from higher rank lattices are superexpanders. This is joint work with Mikael de la Salle.