Dr Nicolas Dettling

Dr Nicolas Dettling is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), Cambridge. His research focuses on advancing coupled climate models, particularly the representation of Antarctic ice-shelf collapse within the UK Earth System Model—one of the UK’s primary contributions to the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) and the Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). His work seeks to improve understanding of ice–ocean interactions, their impact on Southern Ocean circulation, and their consequences for global sea-level rise.

Dr Dettling holds a Master’s degree in Climate Physics from the University of Kiel and a PhD from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, where he developed improved parameterizations of mesoscale eddies in ocean models to better simulate heat fluxes toward Antarctica. While his expertise lies in numerical modeling, he has also acquired field experience in polar environments, conducting research at the Antarctic field base Julio Escudero and during a central Arctic expedition aboard the research icebreaker FS Polarstern.