William Likos
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Engineering
As the climate warms, permafrost is thawing and frozen ground in cold regions is becoming less stable, raising risks of land sinking, erosion and landslides. Predicting these hazards requires knowing how much water in soil stays liquid below freezing.
- Fields
Engineering
Earth & Environmental Science
- Topics
frozen soil
unfrozen water content
permafrost
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2027
What they work on
- Formulate a theory based on a generalized soil water potential, combining capillarity and adsorption, that predicts pore water pressure and ice formation in freezing soil.
- Advance laboratory methods to measure soil water isotherms and soil freezing curves across many soil types and pore fluid chemistries.
- Derive closed-form equations for soil freezing and thawing curves, and relationships that predict them from specific surface area and cation exchange capacity.
More about the research
This depends on how tightly water clings to soil particles and the tiny pores between them. This collaborative project seeks a new, unified way to quantify that unfrozen water.
Why it matters
Better predictions of how soils freeze and thaw could help engineers and planners in cold regions anticipate permafrost behavior, ground settlement, erosion and landslides as the climate warms. The simple predictive equations could let practitioners estimate this behavior from routine soil properties.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Mohammad Khosravi
Montana State University, MT·Engineering
Determine how microstructural features such as grain size, ice content and void structure control the large-scale mechanical properties of permafrost, using X-ray computed tomography imaging of frozen soil.
Jack Montgomery
Auburn University, AL·Engineering·Early-career
Use X-ray micro-CT imaging to determine how soil microstructure controls subsurface erosion rates in unsaturated soils.
Kevin Schaefer
University of Colorado Boulder, CO·Earth & Environmental Science
Quantify how different environmental conditions affect mercury accumulation in permafrost-region soils, with uncertainty estimates, by linking mercury pathways to existing models of the land carbon cycle.
The school
University of Wisconsin-Madison: 91 labs on PI Pages, $1.9B a year on research, 854 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.