Ice has always been fascinating to Alison Criscitiello.
“I had a science teacher who did a short unit on glaciers … I couldn’t believe they were real,” she says. That classroom encounter when she was in eight grade in Winchester, Massachusetts, had a lasting impact.
Ice has always been fascinating to Alison Criscitiello.
“I had a science teacher who did a short unit on glaciers … I couldn’t believe they were real,” she says. That classroom encounter when she was in eight grade in Winchester, Massachusetts, had a lasting impact.
Criscitiello went on to earn MIT’s first PhD in glaciology, and now she is an adjunct assistant professor of glaciology at the University of Calgary in Canada. She studies the history of sea ice and polar marine environments, primarily by drilling ice cores on land-based ice sheets and ice caps in both the Arctic and Antarctic. In March, Criscitiello became the technical director of the newly-created Canadian Ice Core Archive at the University of Alberta, where scientists will have access to 1.7 kilometers of core samples.
“The very northernmost reaches of the Canadian High Arctic are incredibly understudied and undersampled,” says Criscitiello. To reach remote sites, she often must take several small prop plane flights and then ski in to the destination. On trips to such places as West Antarctica and Greenland, she has had to camp on ice sheets; in Greenland, she’s even slept with a shotgun in case of polar bear attacks.
Continue reading at MIT.
Photo via MIT.
