Professor Andrew Fowler is a Research Professor at the University of Limerick and Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Oxford. He was an undergraduate and then graduate in mathematics at Oxford, and completed his thesis on glacier dynamics in 1977. Following this, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at Trinity College Dublin and then an Assistant Professor at MIT. He returned to Oxford as a Lecturer in 1985 and was promoted to Professor in 2014. In 2007, he was appointed Stokes Professor at the University of Limerick, and was appointed a Research Professor there in 2012.
Dr. Felix Ng is a Reader in Theoretical Glaciology at the University of Sheffield. Having grown up in Hong Kong and attended middle school in the UK, he read the undergraduate degree in Engineering Science at the University of Oxford. There, he subsequently completed his D.Phil. in Mathematical Glaciology at the Mathematical Institute in 1998. In the following years, he held postdoctoral research positions at Oxford, the University of Washington, and MIT. He was appointed a Lecturer in Glaciology at the University of Sheffield in 2005, before being promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2012, and to Reader in 2018.
Our realisation of how profoundly glaciers and ice sheets respond to climate change and impact sea level and the environment has propelled their study to the forefront of Earth system science. Aspects of this multidisciplinary endeavour now constitute major areas of research. This book is named after the international summer school held annually in the beautiful alpine village of Karthaus, Northern Italy, and consists of twenty chapters based on lectures from the school. They cover theory, methods, and observations, and introduce readers to essential glaciological topics such as ice-flow dynamics, polar meteorology, mass balance, ice-core analysis, paleoclimatology, remote sensing and geophysical methods, glacial isostatic adjustment, modern and past glacial fluctuations, and ice sheet reconstruction. The chapters were written by thirty-four contributing authors who are leading international authorities in their fields. The book can be used as a graduate-level textbook for a university course, and as a valuable reference guide for practising glaciologists and climate scientists.