Breaking the ice for academia

When Victoria Fitzgerald arrived at the University of Alabama to begin geology PhD work in January, she thought she would spend most of her time studying the Jurassic Period eolian rock formations of west Alabama, extending her master’s research. She never thought she would wind up in Antarctica researching a ‘Doomsday Glacier’. Fitzgerald joined with her advisor, UA assistant professor Dr. Rebecca Totten-Minzoni, to assist on the International Thwaites Glacier Collaboration (ITGC) Thwaites Offshore Research (THOR) team, to better understand the risks and recent history of rapidly changing Thwaites glaciers, better known as the Doomsday Glacier. As the glaciers melt, global sea levels will rise. “Our goal isn’t to tell people the world is filled with doom and gloom,” she said, but rather to “figure out the timeline.” Although not fully understood how it’s changing, and the rate it responds to change over the past 10,000 years, the duo is “studying sediment to develop better models and account for variables that we haven’t yet.” Fitzgerald and Minzoni are part of a team of ITGC researchers funded by the National Science Foundation and UK’s Natural Environment Research Council. Minzoni is a co-investigator for THOR. Fitzgerald’s role was to help sample mud collected from the ocean floor, to reconstruct the behavior of the glacier through the analyses of melt-water samples, microfossils, grain size, and other proxies. The data will help researchers learn more about the glacier. “I’m focusing on the most recent change at the glacier front, which is actually several kilometers further inland than it was two or three years ago. We were the first people ever to be that close to the ice front.” (Source: University of Alabama 06/2019)