Cymene Howe is a professor of anthropology at Rice University. In her Academy project, “MELT//RISE,” Howe plans to bring research in the social sciences to bear on the physical connections and adaptation responses to ice melt and sea-level rise. She designs her research around a new modeling tool developed by NASA physicists, the “gradient fingerprint map,” which pinpoints contributions from each major glacial basin—from the Himalayas to Antarctica and from the Alps to the Andes—to calculate how sites of melting ice contribute to sea level rise in specific coastal cities.