Ruth Mottram

Ruth Helen Mottram (born 1978) is a British and Danish climate scientist and glaciologist who serves as a Senior Climate Scientist at the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) and Honorary Professor at Aarhus University's Department of Environmental Science. She is a recognized expert on the Greenland ice sheet and Antarctic ice sheet, climate modelling, and ice sheet–atmosphere interactions. Mottram is a contributing author to the IMBIE team, whose work quantifying ice sheet loss has been published in Nature and contributes to the European Space Agency's Climate Change Initiative for the Greenland ice sheet.

Early life and education

Mottram studied geography at the University of Edinburgh, earning a master of art's degree in 2000. She then completed a Master of Research in the natural environment, where her research on tor formation and the exposure history of the Cairngorm Plateau utilized cosmogenic beryllium-10 and aluminium-26 to date terrestrial landforms and quantify bedrock erosion rates.

Research and career

Mottram initially developed the use of the regional atmospheric climate model HIRHAM5, which combines HIRLAM (High Resolution Limited Area Model) and ECHAM (a global climate model), to study surface mass balance and interactions between the atmosphere and ice sheets. Based at the Danish Meteorological Institute since 2009, she primarily researches polar climate processes and contributes to the World Climate Research Programme's CORDEX initiative, producing regional climate simulations for the Arctic and Antarctic. She is a core member of the Polar Portal team, which carries out near real-time monitoring of the Arctic cryosphere, including live updates of satellite datasets tracking sea ice, icebergs, permafrost, and a daily updated Greenland ice sheet surface mass balance dataset. She has published extensively on comparing satellite observations with climate model outputs to assess ice sheet evolution.

Mottram's research on Antarctic surface mass balance includes intercomparisons of regional climate model estimates to assess ice sheet mass changes, as published in her 2021 study in The Cryosphere. . She leads the EU partners in the Horizon Europe project OCEAN:ICE and is principal investigator in the ESA project PISCO, both advancing understanding of polar ice sheets and climate dynamics. She has also contributed to palaeoclimate studies at Kangiata Nunaata Sermia, a major tidewater glacier in south west Greenland, where sedimentary sequences showing the glacier advanced 15 km during the 12th century were identified. . Her research on numerical models of crevasse depths led to a widely adopted technique for estimating calving frequency in ice sheet models. AP News, and EUobserver. She contributes annual scientific updates on the state of the Greenland ice sheet to Carbon Brief, including reports that Greenland lost 105 billion tonnes of ice in 2024–25, continuing a trend of nearly three decades of continuous annual ice loss.

"The sea ice surrounding Greenland is also changing. It is thinner, it breaks up earlier, and opens up more frequently." — Ruth Mottram, on Arctic climate change impacts

Selected publications