Glaciology — Numerical modeling — Field geophysics
Ice in
motion
Brandon Finley — PhD researcher building GPU-accelerated models of glacier flow, from subglacial hydrology to the sediments of Greenland fjords.
Ilulissat Icefjord — field site
est. velocity ~40 m/day
What I do
I build numerical models of how glaciers flow, drain, and erode — and test them against data from the fjords they carve.
Selected work
Subglacial drainage, sediment transport, and erosion for a TensorFlow-based glacier model.
002 Fjord sub-bottom imaging Geophysics · FieldChirp SBP processing and bathymetric mapping of sediment architecture at marine glacier margins.
003 Variational ice flow solvers Numerics · MLEnergy-minimization formulations of higher-order ice flow, from Newton methods to Deep Ritz.
004 Scientific visualization 3D · InteractiveInteractive models and figures — glacier geometry, bathymetry, and simulation output.
The governing idea
$$ \dot{\varepsilon}_{ij} \;=\; A\,\tau_e^{\,n-1}\,\tau_{ij} $$Glen's flow law — ice as a shear-thinning fluid. Most of my work amounts to solving this well, at scale, on real geometry.