To the ends of the Earth
CEOAS women lead the way in polar science
1955
Candidates, SINGLE, must be keen young men of good education and high physical standard who have a genuine interest in polar research and travel and are willing to spend 18–30 months under conditions which are a test of character and resource. 1
1957
Women will not be allowed in the Antarctic until we can provide one woman for every man. 2
1960
There were no facilities for women in the Antarctic, i.e., there was not a separate toilet, there were no shops, there were no hairdressers. 3
As so many women faculty members and students in Oregon State University's College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences prove, times have changed. Women are now fully engaged in all aspects of polar research, as scientists, students and support staff. Not all of the news on this front is so rosy: As a recent article in CEOAS’ Strata magazine reveals, there is still much work to be done for women to achieve equity in polar science, and even a longer road to full inclusion of other minoritized groups.
Within CEOAS, amazing science is being done in polar regions by women. While the Strata article focused on the challenges women still face in these fields, we don’t want to lose sight of the incredible science women in CEOAS are doing at the ends of the Earth.
Meet some of the CEOAS women conducting polar science! L-R: Kim Bernard, Jenny Hutchings, Erin Pettit, Laurie Juranek. Scroll on to learn more!
Biological oceanographer Kim Bernard has wanted to go to Antarctica for almost as long as she can remember. Dreams do come true: She has now spent multiple austral winters at Palmer Station in Antarctica, studying her favorite organism, Antarctic krill. These miniscule, shrimp-like crustaceans are one of the most important organisms in the Southern Ocean, as they fuel entire rich Antarctic ecosystems. Krill feed seabirds, whales and fish, swarming in great masses that outweigh every other organism on Earth.
But krill are in danger: Climate change and human fisheries (for krill oil nutritional supplements, pet food and other uses) mean less krill than there used to be. Kim and her (nearly all-female) teams of graduate students and technicians tend to go to Antarctica and stay for the entire winter, under harsh and isolating conditions, in order to determine how the krill get by during these lean winter months. They travel to Palmer Station via research vessel, collecting krill along the way to use at experiments they run in the station’s laboratories.
Learn more about Antarctic krill ...
Animals of the Ice - Antarctic Krill
Scenes from an Antarctic winter at Palmer Station, courtesy of Kim Bernard
Here are some places to learn more about Kim's work:
You can also keep up with Kim's adventures on Twitter and Instagram -- she is psycho_kriller on both platforms.
Jenny Hutchings loves to watch ice move. "It's as simple as that," she says. Her "simple" pleasure has deep roots in her childhood.
"When I was about eight, my mom took me to see a ship, Captain Scott's ship, the Discovery. And that was it. I have been fascinated by the polar regions ever since. I read about the British explorers, I was fascinated by [Robert Falcon] Scott. And then I realized that there were a few ways to get to the Antarctic. And one of them was to be a scientist," she says.
The movement of Arctic sea ice that so mesmerizes Hutchings is like nothing else on Earth – it is episodic and relatively fast, and it is heavily influenced by climate change in a place that is warming faster than anywhere else on the planet. The behavior of sea ice also influences climate: Sea ice is a barrier between the ocean and atmosphere, and when it cracks and splits, heat and moisture are exchanged between the two realms. For all these reasons, it is critical to accurately represent sea ice dynamics in climate models.
Perhaps Hutchings’ most up-close-and-personal observations of sea ice movement came in 2019, when she was part of the international MOSAiC (Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate) program, the largest polar expedition in history. For a year, shifts of scientists with MOSAiC stayed aboard a polar ice-breaking ship as it drifted with the Arctic ice pack, giving us unprecedented information about sea ice behavior and global climate change.
MacKenzie Jewell
One of Jenny's claims to fame is that she has been an outstanding advisor to many students over her career. One of her current students, MacKenzie Jewell, uses satellite observations of sea ice movement to help improve models of that movement. “I'm interested in how can we improve the representation of ice physics so that we can better understand how ice will respond to changes in Arctic climate. There is a really strong need for operational forecasting of ice conditions so that people can safely navigate icy waters. And it's challenging to predict," she says.
Here are some places to learn more about Jenny's work, and about the MOSAiC expedition:
Erin Pettit is also into ice, but instead of sea ice she studies glaciers and ice sheets as they move over land. She examines the response of glaciers to changes in the atmosphere, the ocean, and even the land underneath them. “These masses of ice that dance through the landscape are being affected by everything around them,” she says. “I look at how they shrink and grow, how they flow and fracture. And ultimately, the big question is, how are these changes contributing to meltwater downstream, leading to sea level rise? In the process, we want to understand the internal workings of glaciers. Glaciers are being pushed and prodded and guided by these external processes, but they also have internal processes that may not directly follow from that external influence.”
Pettit is also interested in ensuring that girls and girl-identifying youth have opportunities to learn to do field work in rugged and remote places. To that end, she founded Girls on Ice, which has now evolved into Inspiring Girls* Expeditions , an organization that runs tuition-free expeditions for high school girls* that interweave field science, art, and backcountry travel. IGE operates on multiple continents and in a range of landscape types.
*Inspiring Girls Expeditions welcomes cisgender girls and transgender, agender, Two Spirit, nonbinary, intersex, and genderqueer youth.
Here are some places to learn more about Erin's work:
Laurie Juranek came from a family chock-full of scientists, but from an early age her tide pooling and beach walks helped her put her own spin on the family business. She became enamored with the marine environment: "Ocean science brought many fields together for me," she says, "And that's what I really love about it. It's biology, it's chemistry, it's physics, it's all of the things in one place." She started off studying in the tropics, but a post-doctoral project brought her to the Arctic for the first time, and she was hooked. She has conducted work aboard ships in the Arctic nearly every year since 2011.
"I love it," she says of the Arctic environment. "I was totally hooked on that first cruise. It's just a fascinating, beautiful place. I can just stare at mosaics of ice for ages. It feels really special to me in the sense that it's a place that's changing so rapidly."
That change is the crux of much of Laurie's research. As the ice season has gotten shorter at both ends, Laurie and other scientists have been observing fundamental changes in these ecosystems, especially in primary productivity and carbon cycling, the focus of her work.
At the end of the ice season, sea ice is melting sooner than it used to. Fall storms occur more frequently now over open water, rather than over sea ice, churning nutrients up from the depths to fertilize previously desert-like areas that had been depleted of nutrients. The result is often a mini-bloom of plankton in the fall, a common phenomenon in temperate regions but not at the poles. She uses novel tracers and isotopes to ask questions about these changes: How are these nutrients getting to the surface and at what scales? What nutrients are controlling bloom dynamics? How fast, and how much, is this system changing? Between this line of inquiry and her other extensive work on marine productivity in the Arctic and elsewhere, she has spent over 600 days at sea in the past decade or so.
Here are some places to learn more about Laurie's work:
The work of these women is just the tip of the iceberg here at CEOAS. We have women faculty and students at both poles watching and learning about our changing planet. Our geographers measure snowpack levels in Alaska, microbiologists monitor microbe populations in fragile Arctic lagoons, and chemical oceanographers look at methane seeps under Antarctic ice and oxygen dynamics in the Arctic. Still others are interested in sea ice, ice cores, glaciers and climate change impacts. To learn more, explore the Cryosphere section of our website.
- London Times advertisement for the Falklands Island Dependency Survey, 12 September 1955. Quoted in Klaus Dodds, “Settling and Unsettling Antarctica,” Signs, 34, 3 (Spring 009): 505-09.
- U.S. Navy Adm. George Dufek, the supervisor of U.S. programs in Antarctica in 1957 (tinyurl. com/2rj9evd8)
- A 1960 rejection letter from the British Antarctic Survey after a woman applied to the program (The Telegraph, 20 May 2012. Available at tinyurl.com/5n6em7hy)
