Breaking the Ice Ceiling: Dr. Michelle Guitard

Dr. Michelle Guitard is a paleoceanographer interested in understanding the interactions between Antarctica’s ice shelves and ice sheets and the surrounding ocean. A paleoceanographer is a scientist who uses natural archives to study how the marine environment changed through time. The natural archive that she relies on are sediment cores, which contain layers of mud that provide a snapshot of the environment in which the mud was deposited. Her work is focused on reconstruction the history of the Antarctic ice sheet through the Pleistocene (last 2.5 million years) and the Holocene (12,000-2.5 million years ago), studying how the outlet glacier systems in East Antarctica evolved.  On this episode, we discuss her work and Antarctic fieldwork, getting her Ph.D., gender and racial diversity among doctorates in earth, atmospheric and ocean sciences.  Her research has implications for understanding the stability of the entire Antarctic Ice Sheet, which be critical for predicting how Antarctica will respond to a warming climate. Learn more and follow her work on her Twitter page: https://twitter.com/mich_loves_mud