Speakers

Hon Grant Robertson

Hon Grant Robertson became the University of Otago Vice Chancellor on 1 July 2024 and comes to the University after fifteen years as an MP. Grant was Minister of Finance from 2017 until 2023 and Deputy Prime Minister from 2020 to 2023. In addition, he has held Ministerial portfolios as Leader of the House, Infrastructure, Sport and Recreation, Racing, Earthquake Commission, Cyclone Recovery and an Associate Ministerial role in Arts, Culture and Heritage. As Minister of Finance, Grant led the economic response to the COVID pandemic.  As Minister of Sport and Recreation Grant led New Zealand's first strategy for Women and Girls in Sport and Recreation.  

Grant is a former diplomat, having worked for the New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade managing the Overseas Development Assistance Programme in Samoa and representing New Zealand at the United Nations in New York on development and environmental issues. He also worked as an Advisor to former Prime Minister Helen Clark and for the University of Otago as a Business Development Manager in the Research and Enterprise Office. 

Grant met his partner, Alf, through playing rugby and their family now includes four grandchildren. Grant is interested in sport, alternative music, New Zealand art and literature. He is a former trustee of the New Zealand Aids Foundation (now the Burnett Foundation) and is a supporter of a number of charitable organisations, particularly through his work as the MP for Wellington Central. 

Dr Christina Hulbe

Rapid change in the Amundsen Sea sector of West Antarctica raises concern that a threshold for unstoppable grounding line retreat has been or is about to be crossed. The grounding line is a transition between ice that is resting on the sea floor and ice that is floating in the ocean. As ice flows across this boundary, water that had been stored away in the ice sheet returns to the global ocean. In its simplest form, the threshold for unstoppable retreat is due to the inland-deepening bed of the glacier together with the power-law relationship between ice thickness and ice flux across the boundary. More completely, stability of the grounding line position depends on the three-dimensional shape of the landscape through which the glacier flows and processes acting at its boundaries. The focus here is the shape of, and spatial variation in, the subglacial bed. Using a dynamical model of ice sheet flow, we show that as the grounding line retreats, the threshold for runaway retreat does not occur a place but through a set of processes and that small differences in forcing lead to large differences in retreat rate and ice discharge across the grounding line. Put another way, there is neither reason to panic when particular geographic waypoints are passed, nor reason to be relieved that they have not. Retreat may be inevitable past a certain dynamical threshold, but the rate at which the retreat proceeds remains in our control.