Researching Antarctic Surface Melt at Cambridge

The Wheel 2022 — St Catharine's College magazine cover

St Catharine's College, University of Cambridge — The Wheel 2022 (College magazine) · 2022

The Wheel is St Catharine's College's annual print magazine, sent to alumni and friends of the College each year. The 2022 edition includes a two-page feature on "Advancing polar research", profiling three members of the St Catharine's polar community — and I was honoured to be one of them, alongside Professor David Aldridge (on Antarctic biosecurity) and my MPhil supervisor Professor Ian Willis (on ice shelf dynamics).

My contribution: amplifying diversity in polar exploration

The piece’s middle section profiled my work as a co-organiser of Polar Impact, the volunteer network founded in Cambridge in 2019 to connect and amplify the voices of Black, Asian, Indigenous and minority ethnic professionals and people of colour working in polar research.

“Polar research certainly wasn’t a career choice that I was aware of during my early years in India or growing up in Canada — but I’m proud of the journey I’ve made to St Catharine’s. I’m inspired by how Polar Impact connects minorities and allies in our niche field. By sharing real-world experiences, we can begin to challenge the stereotype of polar exploration being exclusively the domain of white men. We’re expanding our activities into scholarships, training and workshops to support talented researchers from under-represented backgrounds.”

The Wheel pointed readers to the longer Polar Impact feature published earlier on the College website — included separately on this site as A Scott Polar Scholar on Diversity in Polar Research.

On the same page: the science underneath

The “Studying ice shelves” section on the same page covered Professor Ian Willis’s November 2021 expedition to the George VI Ice Shelf — the second largest ice shelf on the Antarctic Peninsula, and the system I was simultaneously analysing for my MPhil thesis at Cambridge using satellite and in-situ data the team retrieved.

Prof Willis’s quote framed the question my own thesis was trying to answer:

“These data will enable us to examine how much melting occurs each summer, how much of that water ponds up in lakes, and how that melting and ponding causes the floating ice shelf to bend and possibly crack. It is essential to understand how ice shelves fracture and break up because this may be more likely in the future due to global warming.”

I used remote sensor and satellite data from the same field campaign to model the atmospheric drivers of surface melt — the work that became my dissertation.

The page as printed

The Wheel 2022 — page 4: Advancing polar research