Peter Kuipers Munneke works at the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research (IMAU) in the Ice and Climate group. This research group studies ice sheets and sea levels as they were millions of years ago, but also now and in the coming centuries.

Research within the Ice and Climate group at IMAU has three main focus areas:

1. Regional modelling of the ice-sheet surface of Antarctica and Greenland. The focus is on the interaction between the ice sheets and the changing climate.
2. Automatic weather stations. For more than 25 years, IMAU has been a global leader in the development of automatic measuring stations placed on ice sheets and glaciers worldwide.
3. Sea level and the coast. Regional variations in sea level rise can be very large, and the impact of sea level rise can also vary widely between regions. This is a research focus for IMAU, both for the distant past of millions of years ago, and for the present and near future.

Peter Kuipers Munneke focuses on regional modelling and automatic weather stations. More specifically, he looks at the snow layer on top of the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. This snow layer heats up and melts away. But in some places, snowfall also increases, which compensates for the loss of the snow layer by melting. On Greenland, the aim is to establish how much of the melt water that forms on the ice sheet actually ends up in the ocean. Part of the melt water refreezes in the snow layer. In Antarctica, Peter’s research focuses on the ice shelves that surround the ice sheet. These are large floating glaciers that stabilize the land ice, like a cork on a bottle. Because the snow layer on some of these ice shelves disappears, the ice sheets can become unstable and collapse. Peter's research contributes to a better understanding of these processes.