Prestigious NZIMA Scholarship Award

The School of Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science, and his supervisor Mark McGuinness, are delighted to announce that Jonathan Crook has been awarded a prestigious NZ Institute of Mathematics and its Applications Award, to support him in his work towards a Phd in mathematics. Only a small number of these awards are made throughout New Zealand in each year.

Jonathan's research topic is modelling the growth of young fast sea ice in Antarctica. He is keen to combine his strengths in mathematics and physics, and Antarctic fast sea ice presents some interesting challenges. Here, fast does not mean speedy, but land-fast or attached to the land.

Antarctic sea ice is important for a number of reasons - it affects global warming, since it insulates the air from the ocean; when it forms, heavy salty water is rejected into the sea, driving large-scale currents in all of the world's oceans; biota are known to winter-over in the safe but chilly confines of sea ice, before they are released into the Southern Ocean and initiate a summer feeding frenzy in the food chain.

A very special kind of ice crystal called platelet ice presents a puzzle in Antarctica: why does it wait a bit, then show up in fast ice that is greater than one metre thick? Present models tend to ignore the mechanisms that can lead to platelet ice. Present analyses tend to be purely numerical. The challenge for Jonathan is to investigate the role of platelets in fast ice, using analytical, asymptotic, and numerical techniques.