Brent Minchew

Research Interests

I study how glaciers and ice sheets respond to climate change. I am most interested in understanding the mechanisms that will govern rates of sea-level rise in the coming decades and centuries. I am drawn to this work in large part because it is important and challenging and allows me to see nature at its most elegant, both fragile and resilient, stately and responsive. My research spans scales from atomic to continental, laboratory to glacial, seconds to centuries, and I use a variety of tools ranging from satelliite radar to mathematial theory. 

I lead an interdisciplinary group of geophysicists, glaciologists, mechanicians, and geodesists who study the interactions between the climate, the cryosphere, and the solid earth using a combination of geodetic observations—primarily interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR)—and physical models. Occasionally, we take short breaks from glacier mechanics to develop remote sensing tools and applications that can be used to help mitigate natural and anthropogenic environmental hazards—like characterizing marine oil spills and monitoring wildfires.

Topics I investigate:

• Kinematic remote sensing
• Mechanics of deformable glacier beds
• Rheology of ice in shear zones
• Mechanics of calving and rifting
• Hazard response and mitigation

Biographic Sketch

Brent Minchew joined the EAPS faculty in 2018. After serving nearly eight years in the Marine Corps, he studied aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, earning a BS in 2008 and MS in 2010. Minchew went on to complete his a PhD studies in geophysics at the California Institute of Technology in 2016, where he also spent time as a Graduate Research Fellow at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Before arriving at MIT, Minchew was awarded a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship, studying at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, UK.