Jelte de Bruin

CR Cryospheric Sciences

The 2023 Outstanding Student and PhD candidate Presentation (OSPP) Award is awarded to Jelte de Bruin for the poster/PICO entitled:

Detecting permafrost freeze-thaw front propagation using time-laps ERT observations in a large column experiment (de Bruin, J. G. H.; Bense, V. F.; van der Ploeg, M.)

Click here to download the poster/PICO file.

Jelte de Bruin is a PhD candidate in the Hydrology and Quantitative Water Management group at Wageningen University (the Netherlands), working together with Victor Bense and Martine van der Ploeg. His research project focuses on the evolution of thawing permafrost and the effects on emerging groundwater flowpaths using both numerical modeling and freeze-thaw experiments in a lab.

The study presented at the EGU 2023 showed how to track a permafrost thawing front using simultaneous temperature and 3D timelapse Electrical Resistivity Tomography (ERT) observations. The work was carried out using a column experiment placed within a climate chamber, where a soil column was frozen and subsequently thawed over a 4 month period. During the freezing and thawing process, temperature and timelapse ERT observations were collected. After temperature correcting the resistivity observations, a clear thawing front could be tracked using ERT over time.