Jingtao Lai
GM Geomorphology
The 2021 Virtual Outstanding Student and PhD candidate Presentation (vOSPP) Award is awarded to Jingtao Lai for the poster/PICO entitled:
Climatic controls on mountain glacier basal thermal regimes dictate spatial patterns of glacial erosion (Lai, J.; Anders, A.)
Jingtao Lai recently received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA), and he is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences (Germany). His research interests center around the interactions between climate, tectonics, and surface processes and their impacts on landscape evolution. During his Ph.D. work, he developed numerical models to study the tectonic and climatic controls on glacial/postglacial landscape evolution. The awarded presentation at EGU 2021 discussed the linkage between climatic conditions, the basal thermal regime of glaciers, and the spatial patterns of glacial erosion in mountain glaciers. The results show that different climatic conditions produce glaciers with similar equilibrium line altitudes (ELAs) but different patterns of basal thermal regime and glacial erosion, suggesting that there might not be any direct correlation between ELAs and glacial erosion patterns.