Mary Remley Albert | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1952 (age 70–71) |
| Alma mater | Pennsylvania State University Dartmouth College |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | Dartmouth College CRREL |
| Thesis | Wavy ice growth in forced flow (1991) |
Mary Remley Albert (born 1952) is an American earth scientist who is a Professor of Engineering at Dartmouth College. She studies snow physics and transport phenomena. She is executive director of the US Ice Drilling Program.
Albert was an undergraduate student at Pennsylvania State University. She first studied mathematics, before moving to Dartmouth College for graduate studies. Her master's work developed two-dimensional models to understand freezing using a moving mesh finite element approach. [1] After earning her master's degree in engineering sciences, she moved to the University of California, San Diego. Her doctoral research considered the growth of wavy ice in forced flow. [2] She joined the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Cold Regions Research and Engineering Lab (CRREL), [3] where she developed computational models to understand two-dimensional heat conduction. [4]
At Dartmouth, Albert is a member of the Ice Research Laboratory. [5] The laboratory looks to advance understanding of ice-related phenomena and train the next generation of polar researchers. [6] [7] She makes use of polar ice cores to better understand the climate catastrophe as well as developing adaptation strategies for communities to survive as the world's climate changes. [8] [9] Albert has been involved with scientific expeditions to Greenland and Antarctica. [10] On these missions, she uses shallow radar, GPS and satellite imagery to understand the processes that go on in polar regions. [3] In particular, Albert has studied ancient snow known as firn, which provides insight into 800,000 years of climate. [11] She extracts firn from ice sheets, examines the firn's microstructure and monitors how it traps atmospheric gases. [11] Albert worked with people from Qaanaaq to build renewable energy infrastructure that serves the northernmost communities of Greenland. [12] [13]
Albert has served on various national committees considering ice and polar science. [8] Albert serves as executive director of the United States Ice Drilling Program, [14] which is supported by the National Science Foundation. [15] The Ice Drilling Program oversees planning for ice coring and drilling. [15] The program releases regular white papers, [16] maintains an equipment inventory [17] and runs a comprehensive education program. [18]
Albert is married to a geophysicist with whom she has two children. Both of her children are engineers. [9]
An ice core is a core sample that is typically removed from an ice sheet or a high mountain glacier. Since the ice forms from the incremental buildup of annual layers of snow, lower layers are older than upper ones, and an ice core contains ice formed over a range of years. Cores are drilled with hand augers or powered drills; they can reach depths of over two miles (3.2 km), and contain ice up to 800,000 years old.
Eismitte, in English also called Mid-Ice, was the site of an Arctic expedition in the interior of Greenland that took place from July 1930 through August 1931, and claimed the life of noted German scientist Alfred Wegener.
The Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center (BPCRC) is a polar, alpine, and climate research center at The Ohio State University founded in 1960.
A polar ice cap or polar cap is a high-latitude region of a planet, dwarf planet, or natural satellite that is covered in ice.
The Greenland Ice Sheet Project (GISP) was a decade-long project to drill ice cores in Greenland that involved scientists and funding agencies from Denmark, Switzerland and the United States. Besides the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF), funding was provided by the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Danish Commission for Scientific Research in Greenland. The ice cores provide a proxy archive of temperature and atmospheric constituents that help to understand past climate variations.
The Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) is a United States Army Corps of Engineers, Engineer Research and Development Center research facility headquartered in Hanover, New Hampshire, that provides scientific and engineering support to the U.S. government and its military with a core emphasis on cold environments. CRREL also provides technical support to non-government customers.
Lonnie Thompson, is an American paleoclimatologist and university professor in the School of Earth Sciences at Ohio State University. He has achieved global recognition for his drilling and analysis of ice cores from ice caps and mountain glaciers in the tropical and sub-tropical regions of the world. He and his wife, Ellen Mosley-Thompson, run the ice core paleoclimatology research group at the Byrd Polar Research Center.
Dye 3 is an ice core site and previously part of the DYE section of the Distant Early Warning (DEW) line, located at in Greenland. As a DEW line base, it was disbanded in years 1990/1991.
The WAIS Divide is the ice flow divide on the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) which is a linear boundary that separates the region where the ice flows to the Ross Sea, from the region where the ice flows to the Weddell Sea. It is similar to a continental hydrographic divide.
The Norwegian-U.S. Scientific Traverse of East Antarctica is a research program consisting of two overland traverses of East Antarctica: the first from the Norwegian Troll Station to the South Pole in the 2007/2008 season; and a return traverse via a different route in 2008/2009. The main research focus of the program is climate change, the stated goals being to:
Ellen Mosley-Thompson is a glaciologist and climatologist. She is a Distinguished University Professor at The Ohio State University and director of their Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center. She is known as a pioneer in the use of ice cores from the Polar Regions for paleoclimatic research and is an influential figure in climate science. She is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union and an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Dorthe Dahl-Jensen is a Danish palaeoclimatology professor and researcher at the Centre for Ice and Climate at the Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen in Denmark. Her primary field is the study of ice and climate, specifically the reconstruction of climate records from ice cores and borehole data; ice flow models to date ice cores; continuum mechanical properties of anisotropic ice; ice in the solar system; and the history and evolution of the Greenland Ice Sheet.
Albert Valley is a hanging valley between Conway Peak and Wendler Spur in the central Apocalypse Peaks of Victoria Land. The valley opens north to Barwick Valley. Named in 2005 by the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names after Mary R. Albert, Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory, Hanover, NH, who conducted field and laboratory research to characterize ice core, firn, and snow properties from Siple Dome, from the US-ITASE traverses of West Antarctica, and from East Antarctic megadunes, 1996–2003; Member, 2002-, Polar Research Board, National Academy of Sciences; Chair 2003-, U.S. National Committee for the International Polar Year, 2007–08.
Julie Michelle Palais is an American polar glaciologist who has made significant contributions to climate change research studying volcanic fallout in ice cores from both Greenland and Antarctica. For many years, starting in 1990, she played a pivotal role working at the National Science Foundation (NSF) as Program Director of the Antarctic Glaciology Program in the Division of Polar Programs, including many trips to both North and South Polar regions. Both the Palais Glacier and Palais Bluff in Antarctica were named in her honor and she has received many further recognitions for her distinguished career.
Elisabeth Isaksson is a Swedish glaciologist and geologist who has researched polar climate history on the basis of ice cores. She has also studied snow and ice pollution on the Norwegian island of Svalbard and has participated in award-winning European projects on Antarctic climate change.
Ice drilling allows scientists studying glaciers and ice sheets to gain access to what is beneath the ice, to take measurements along the interior of the ice, and to retrieve samples. Instruments can be placed in the drilled holes to record temperature, pressure, speed, direction of movement, and for other scientific research, such as neutrino detection.
Scientific ice drilling began in 1840, when Louis Agassiz attempted to drill through the Unteraargletscher in the Alps. Rotary drills were first used to drill in ice in the 1890s, and thermal drilling, with a heated drillhead, began to be used in the 1940s. Ice coring began in the 1950s, with the International Geophysical Year at the end of the decade bringing increased ice drilling activity. In 1966, the Greenland ice sheet was penetrated for the first time with a 1,388 m hole reaching bedrock, using a combination of thermal and electromechanical drilling. Major projects over the following decades brought cores from deep holes in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.
Julie Brigham-Grette is a glacial geologist and a professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where she co-directs the Joseph Hartshorn Quaternary Laboratory. Her research expertise is in glacial geology and paleoclimatology; she has made important contributions to Arctic marine and terrestrial paleoclimate records of late Cenozoic to recent, the evolution of the Arctic climate, especially in the Beringia/Bering Strait region, and was a leader of the international Lake El’gygytgyn Drilling Project in northeastern Russia.
Liz Thomas is a British climate scientist, specializing in paleoclimatology. Her research mainly focuses on historic climate variability in the Antarctic, and she oversees the British Antarctic Survey's work on collecting and studying ice cores.
| Authority control databases: Academics |
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