About

Jacky Austermann is a faculty member in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University and is associated with the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Her research focuses on understanding Earth's processes, likely involving geophysical and geochemical methods, as inferred from her departmental affiliation and research group context. She is actively engaged in mentoring graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, contributing to the academic community through her leadership and collaborative efforts. Her contact email is provided for professional correspondence.

Research topics

• Geology
• Paleontology
• Oceanography
• Astrobiology
• Climatology
• Environmental science
• Physical geography
• Astronomy
• Engineering
• Biology
• Atmospheric sciences
• Geodesy
• Earth science
• Physics
• Geography
• Aerospace engineering

Selected publications

• Climate-Driven Changing Groundwater Depth across North America

  2026-03-14

  articleOpen access

  Groundwater provides a critical freshwater resource for agriculture, industry, and drinking water across North America. However, the long-term impacts of climate variability and change on groundwater availability remain poorly constrained at continental scales. Here, we evaluate how changing climate variability impacts North American groundwater table depths under three different future climate scenarios. We use the Water Table Model (WTM), a large-scale, physically based hydrological model, to simulate depth to water table at an annual scale from 1800 to 2100 CE. The model is forced by changing precipitation and evapotranspiration based on climate simulations and data from TraCE-21ka (past), CMIP6 (historical and future), and Terraclimate (present). Model results for the historical period (1800–2015) are evaluated against available lake, wetland, and groundwater well observations. Based on this, we find patterns of historical groundwater variability across North America. We then quantify spatial and temporal changes in depth to groundwater and identify regions of long-term groundwater stability, rise, or decline in response to climate forcing under three future scenarios (SSP1-2.6, SSP2-4.5, and SSP5-8.5). Our results reveal strong regional heterogeneity, with relatively stable or rising groundwater levels in humid and high-latitude regions, in contrast to persistent declines in arid and semi-arid zones. Future groundwater availability depends strongly on the emission scenario simulated, highlighting increasing climate-driven groundwater vulnerability across large parts of North America. This work provides a novel, annually resolved, continental scale assessment of climate impacts on groundwater availability and offers valuable insights for large-scale water balance studies, drought assessment, and sustainable groundwater management under a changing climate.

  PublisherDOI

• Grid files of the total isostatic response to the complete unloading of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets (version 3) (2026)

  2026-01-01

  datasetOpen access

  The land surface beneath the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets is isostatically suppressed by the mass of the overlying ice. Accurate computation of the land elevation in the absence of ice is important when considering, for example, regional geodynamics, geomorphology, and ice sheet behaviour. Here, we use contemporary compilations of ice thickness and lithospheric effective elastic thickness to calculate the fully re-equilibrated isostatic response of the solid Earth to the complete removal of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets. We use an elastic plate flexure model to compute the isostatic response to the unloading of the modern ice sheet loads, and a self-gravitating viscoelastic Earth model to make an adjustment for the remaining isostatic disequilibrium driven by ice mass loss since the Last Glacial Maximum. Feedbacks arising from water loading in areas situated below sea level after ice sheet removal are also taken into account. In addition, we quantify the uncertainties in the total isostatic response associated with a range of elastic and viscoelastic Earth properties. The computed isostatic response and rebounded bed elevation grids are provided in NetCDF format and have a number of applications for studying regional geodynamics, landscape evolution, cryosphere dynamics, and relative sea level change. The current version is calculated for: BedMachineGreenland version 6, BedMachineAntarctica version 4, and Bedmap3 (Antarctica)

  OA PDFDOI

• Satellite-derived bathymetry for nearshore mapping and future sea level change in Aasiaat, Greenland

  Remote Sensing Applications Society and Environment · 2026-04-01

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Glacial isostatic adjustment under a changing groundwater load since the Last Glacial Maximum

  2026-03-14

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  During the last deglaciation, the retreating Laurentide Ice Sheet made way for massive proglacial lakes to form and then drain. In a similar fashion, dramatic changes in climate over the deglaciation were reflected in changing groundwater storage through time. We evaluate the impacts of these long-term changes in water storage on Glacial Isostatic Adjustment (GIA) in North America. To do so, we couple the Water Table Model (WTM) – which simulates depth to water table – with a gravitationally self-consistent GIA model to find both changing lake and groundwater storage volumes, and the impacts that these have on changing GIA. Our WTM results show an evolving water table that includes proglacial and pluvial lakes consistent with the geological record. Lake and groundwater loading deflect topography by tens of metres at some locations. Because depth to water table is topography-dependent, we repeat our WTM simulation using updated topographic inputs and find that water table depth is modified by several metres at some locations. The results are highly heterogeneous, reflecting that GIA and hydroclimate together drive long-term water-table change.

  PublisherDOI

• Last Interglacial (Mis 5e) Sea-Level Index Points and Beach Ridge Reconstructions from South Carolina And Florida

  2025-03-15

  preprintOpen access

  The Last Interglacial (Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 5e; ~125,000 Before Present) is a potential analog for modern and future sea-level rise. The East and Gulf Coasts of the United States are useful regions for MIS 5e sea-level reconstructions because they rest on a trailing-edge margin where the tectonic contribution to relative sea level during the late Pleistocene is minimal, and post-glacial isostatic subsidence is a factor due to forebulge collapse. Here we present results from two field investigations conducted for the WARMCOASTS project. The first is a campaign to collect luminescence dating from the Myrtle Beach sector of South Carolina, where we identified several points for which past sea level can be identified at a precise elevation with strong chronology. (sea-level index points). In this area the landscape is defined by a series of sequential beach ridges from the Pliocene and later. Our sampling and dating confirmed the MIS 5e identification of one of these ridges, which we documented with centimeter-scale precision using differential GPS and photogrammetry. These sea-level index points are presented and interpreted together with glacio-hydro-isostatic adjustment model outputs. The second campaign took place in the Florida Panhandle at Port St. Joe and consisted of differential GPS-corrected ground penetrating radar surveys of the extant ridge and swale topography in the area. This study reconstructed the sequence of beach ridge formation during different phases and provides insight into changing conditions based on morphological characteristics of the beach ridge reflectors. Both these sets of data can also be used to discuss the timing and magnitude of glacio-hydro-isostatic adjustment’s contribution to relative sea level, since our research shows conditions during the Last Interglacial at different distances from the ice sheets. This presentation is a contribution to the WARMCOASTS project, which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement n. 802414)

  PublisherDOI

• Supplementary material for Dean et al. - Last Interglacial relative sea-level changes at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2025-12-07

  datasetOpen access

  This repository contains the post-review version of the supplementary material for the manuscript Last Interglacial relative sea-level changes at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina . See the readme file for specifics.

  PublisherDOI

• Satellite-Derived Bathymetry for Nearshore Mapping and Future Sea Level Change in Aasiaat, Greenland

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• The Water Table Model (WTM) (v2.0.1): coupled groundwater and dynamic lake modelling

  Geoscientific model development · 2025-03-10 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract. Ice-free land comprises 26 % of the Earth's surface and holds liquid water that delineates ecosystems, affects global geochemical cycling, and modulates sea levels. However, we currently lack the capacity to simulate and predict these terrestrial water changes across the full range of relevant spatial (watershed to global) and temporal (monthly to millennial) scales. To address this knowledge gap, we present the Water Table Model (WTM), which integrates coupled components to compute dynamic lake and groundwater levels. The groundwater component solves the 2D horizontal groundwater flow equation using non-linear equation solvers from the C++ PETSc (Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation) library. The dynamic lake component makes use of the Fill–Spill–Merge (FSM) algorithm to move surface water into lakes, where it may evaporate or affect groundwater flow. In a proof-of-concept application, we demonstrate the continental-scale capabilities of the WTM by simulating the steady-state climate-driven water table for the present day and the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM; 21 000 calendar years before present) across the North American continent. During the LGM, North America stored an additional 14.98 cm of sea-level equivalent (SLE) in lakes and groundwater compared to the climate-driven present-day scenario. We compare the present-day result to other simulations and real-world data. Open-source code for the WTM is available on GitHub and Zenodo.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Supplementary material for Dean et al. - Last Interglacial relative sea-level changes at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2025-12-07

  datasetOpen access

  This repository contains the post-review version of the supplementary material for the manuscript Last Interglacial relative sea-level changes at Myrtle Beach, South Carolina . See the readme file for specifics.

  PublisherDOI

• Constraining the extent of the Greenland Ice Sheet during warmer climates of the Pliocene and Pleistocene: insights from subglacial geomorphology

  2025-03-14

  preprintOpen access

  The Greenland Ice Sheet is a key contributor to contemporary global sea-level rise, but its long-term history remains highly uncertain. The landscape covered by the ice sheet comprises ∼79% of Greenland and is one of the most sparsely mapped regions on Earth. However, sub-ice geomorphology offers a unique record of environmental conditions prior to and during glaciation, and of the ice sheet’s response to changing climate.Here we use ice-surface morphology and radio-echo sounding data to identify, and quantify the morphology of, valley networks beneath the Greenland Ice Sheet. Our mapping reveals intricate subglacial valley networks beneath the ice-sheet interior that appear to have a fluvial origin. By contrast, in the southern and eastern coastal highlands, valleys have been substantially modified by glacial erosion. We use geomorphometric analysis and simple ice-sheet model experiments to infer that these valleys were incised beneath erosive mountain valley glaciers during one or more phases of Greenland’s glacial history when ice was restricted to the southern and eastern highlands.These inferred early mountain ice masses contained ~0.5 metres of sea-level equivalent (compared to 7.4 metres in the modern Greenland Ice Sheet). We believe the most plausible time for the formation of this landscape was prior to the growth of a continental-scale ice sheet in the late Pliocene, with the possibility of further incision having occurred during particularly warm and/or long-lived Pleistocene interglacials. Our findings therefore provide new data-based constraints on early Greenland Ice Sheet extent and dynamics that can serve as valuable boundary conditions in models of regional and global palaeoclimate during past warm periods that are important analogues for climate change in the 21st century and beyond.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: Terrestrial hydrology during the last deglaciation

  NSF · $274k · 2019–2023

• Reconstructing last interglacial sea level based on models and observation from the Bahamas

  NSF · $473k · 2019–2024

Frequent coauthors

• J. X. Mitrovica

  183 shared

• Konstantin Latychev

  85 shared

• Roger Creel

  Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory

  85 shared

• Alessio Rovere

  Ca' Foscari University of Venice

  81 shared

• Mark Hoggard

  Australian National University

  71 shared

• Maureen E. Raymo

  Columbia University

  56 shared

• H. C. P. Lau

  Providence College

  46 shared

• Fred Richards

  41 shared

Labs

• Jacky Austermann's Research GroupPI

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Education

• Newton International Fellow, Department of Earth Sciences

  University of Cambridge

  2017

• PhD, Earth and Planetary Sciences, Earth and Planetary Sciences Department

  Harvard University

  2016

• Master of Science, Geophysics, Geosciences

  Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitat Munchen

  2011