Ashley Bellas-Manley
Hello and Welcome!
Thank you for visiting my homepage.
I earned a B.Sc. in Geophysics with distinction from the University of British Columbia in 2014. I did field work near the Kaskawulsh glacier in the Yukon Territory, Canada, with Christian Schoof and built a numerial model of the overturning circulation in the Arctic Ocean with Susan Allen. Mark Jellinek inspired my interest in the thermal convection of planetary interiors which led to my pusuit of a PhD in geodynamics.
At the University of Colorado Boulder, I earned a PhD in Geophysics with Prof. Shijie Zhong. I used computational models to contribute a response to the question: why is Earth the only terrestrial planet with plate tectonics? This is an interesting question because of the implications for habitability: plate tectonics efficiently recycles heat between the surface and the deep interior of a planet, and this allows convection in the core to be vigorous enough to sustain a magnetic field, which protects the atmosphere from being ablated away by the solar wind, which allows liquid water to exist on the surface.
Following my PhD, I won a fellowship at Masschusetts Institute of Technology with distinguished Green Professor Leigh Royden. I helped to develop a new stationary reference frame for the mantle based on subducting slabs that penetrate the lower mantle, and used observed hotspot motions to constrain the dynamics of the large low shear velocity provinces (LLSVPs).
At present, I use satellite observations and computational models to quantify, understand, and extrapolate cliamte change through the lens of sea level change and ice mass loss at ice sheets and glaciers with Steven Nerem at CU Boulder.
Please reach out if you see a potential for us to collaborate!
Ann and H.J. Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences
Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research
University of Colorado, Boulder
ashley.bellas (at) colorado (dot) edu