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Adrian Jenkins studies interactions between the ocean and ice shelves. With Lars H. Smedsrud, he developed a model of frazil formation in buoyant ice-shelf-water plumes. As a plume rises into lower pressure, its freezing temperature changes, allowing supercooling and growth of suspended ice crystals.

Their model couples plume flow, heat, salt and crystal populations, linking microscopic freezing with marine-ice accumulation beneath an ice shelf.^[ref]

Consider an equilibrium ice-water wall line plume with volume flux per unit span $Q$, ice volume fraction $\varphi$, liquid salinity $C$, and temperature $T=-mC$. The positive coefficient $m$ is the slope magnitude of a linear liquidus; ambient liquid has salinity $C_0$ and temperature $T_0=-m{C}_0$. Use equal reference densities and equal specific heat capacities $c_p$ in the thermodynamic bookkeeping, and let $L$ be the latent heat of fusion per unit mass.

When entrainment only adds that reference liquid and no crystals or heat escape, the excess enthalpy and salt fluxes are conserved:Combining them gives $E+c_{p}mS=-\varphi Q(L+c_{p}mC)$. Eliminating $C$ with the salt relation yieldsThus the leading dilute-crystal balance is $\varphi Q\simeq (-E-c_{p}mS)/(L+c_{p}m{C}_0)$. More precisely, this limit requires both $L\varphi \ll L+c_{p}m{C}_0$ and $|E|\varphi \ll |E+c_{p}mS|$; cancellation in the source combination can invalidate it even at small $\varphi$.

This conserved leading ice flux can drive a self-similar ice-bearing wall plume. Suspended frazil ice also changes buoyancy in ice-shelf plume models, whose additional crystal-growth, deposition and pressure effects need their own balances.^[ref]

Lars H. Smedsrud coauthored a model of frazil ice in ice-shelf-water plumes with Adrian Jenkins. It follows buoyant water along an ice-shelf base and includes the growth of crystals of different sizes after the plume becomes supercooled.

Suspended ice affects buoyancy, heat and salt balances, while deposition can build marine ice. The model therefore connects an evolving crystal population with large-scale ocean-ice exchange rather than treating freezing as one prescribed boundary flux.^[ref]