NU Ideas Season 3 | No.5
Events List
Monday 10th February | 6pm
Are glaciers maintaining their own existence through chemical weathering?
Dr Joseph Graly, Assistant Professor
Department of Geography and Environmental Science
Glaciers and Geochemistry
Chemical weathering is a key natural process that regulates Earth’s climate over long timescales. Atmospheric carbon dioxide acidifies rainwater, which is then neutralised through interaction with soil and rock, ultimately alkalinising the oceans and returning the carbon to the Earth system. Dr Joseph Graly will examine how chemical weathering occurs in glacial environments. Despite low temperatures, the grinding of rocks and sediments under glaciers can result in rapid and efficient chemical weathering. Dr Graly will share results from his studies in Greenland and Antarctica that illustrate these weathering processes, the new minerals that form under ice, and the impact on the broader Earth system. The scale of chemical alteration under ice is large enough to suggest that glaciers themselves may have played a major role in the lengthening and deepening of the ice ages or the past several million years. It also raises questions about the consequences of the accelerating loss of glacial ice for the broader chemical cycles that support life on earth.
Machine learning for flood prediction: Using Artificial Intelligence to make intelligent decisions
Dr Sadaf Iqbal, Post Doctoral Research fellow
Department of Computer Science
Machine learning, Deep learning
Machine learning and deep learning involves taking in data, extracting relevant details from it so that a useful decision can be made. These have helped humans to design systems that can take decisions that people do based on their intelligence such as speech or number recognition, thereby giving it the name of artificial intelligence. Be it a weather forecast that we see each day as soon as we get up in the morning or the driverless cars out on the roads, these days we all are using AI to make intelligent decisions.
Today I will talk about my project wherein I am using ML/DL to do flood prediction around Northumberland area. I mean who does not want to know in advance about a natural disaster such as flood. Not only know but also to know precisely about its intensity and impact so that it can be mitigated well in advance. I am utilising reliable information available such as water level, rainfall and available future forecasts of rainfall to predict floods in certain risk prone areas of Northumberland. The algorithm learns from the available historical data to extract relevant patterns in the data which can help predict a future flood event which is an Intelligent decision using artificial intelligence.
A LIVE Lit & Phil Event | FREE
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