Natalie Robinson | |
|---|---|
 Natalie Robinson on the sea ice of McMurdo Sound. | |
| Nationality | New Zealand |
| Alma mater | BSc, MSc Victoria University of Wellington PhD University of Otago |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Polar Oceanography |
| Institutions | National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research |
Natalie Robinson, an Antarctic researcher, is based at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in New Zealand. She led the final two K131 Science Events on the sea ice of McMurdo Sound, Antarctica.
Robinson grew up in the Hawke's Bay Region and moved to Victoria University of Wellington to complete her MSc (2005) on tides beneath the McMurdo Ice Shelf with data collected during the ANDRILL project with Alex Pyne and Peter Barrett. [1] She then completed her PhD (2012) at the University of Otago under the supervision of Pat Langhorne. She now works as a research scientist at National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research.
Robinson's work has significant contribution to understanding the oceanic connection between ice shelf and sea ice regimes. This has required direct sub-ice observations of pressure-induced supercooling; multi-phase fluid flow; roughness and drag at the interface; and buoyancy-driven convection. [2] She focuses on the creation, evolution and fate of supercooled water, and its potential to influence sea ice growth [3]
Robinson has led a number of field expeditions to the sea ice of McMurdo Sound, Antarctica. In 2015, she was awarded a prestigious Marsden grant, amounting to $300,000, [4] to study ice roughness beneath ice shelf affected sea ice. [5] This resulted in two expeditions to McMurdo Sound. [6] [7] Her studies showed that new ice crystals could refreeze on the underside of sea ice and make the underside much rougher than under smooth melting ice. [8]
This work used Antarctic infrastructure developed by Timothy Haskell. Robinson led the final expeditions using the "K131" Camp Haskell. [9] The "K131" is an event designation assigned by Antarctica New Zealand.
She has worked with the artist Gabby O'Connor when O'Connor participated in Robinson's 2017 field expedition. This resulted in an exhibition at the Otago Museum in 2018. [10] The lead-character in the play "Chilled: A Cool Story with a Warm Message" was based on Robinson. [11]
In 2021 was named by Forbes Magazine to a panel of seven outstanding researchers in STEM. [12] She has served as Treasurer on the Council of the New Zealand Association of Scientists.
The Ross Sea is a deep bay of the Southern Ocean in Antarctica, between Victoria Land and Marie Byrd Land and within the Ross Embayment, and is the southernmost sea on Earth. It derives its name from the British explorer James Ross who visited this area in 1841. To the west of the sea lies Ross Island and Victoria Land, to the east Roosevelt Island and Edward VII Peninsula in Marie Byrd Land, while the southernmost part is covered by the Ross Ice Shelf, and is about 200 miles (320 km) from the South Pole. Its boundaries and area have been defined by the New Zealand National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research as having an area of 637,000 square kilometres (246,000 sq mi).
The Ross Ice Shelf is the largest ice shelf of Antarctica. It is several hundred metres thick. The nearly vertical ice front to the open sea is more than 600 kilometres (370 mi) long, and between 15 and 50 metres high above the water surface. Ninety percent of the floating ice, however, is below the water surface.
An ice shelf is a large floating platform of ice that forms where a glacier or ice sheet flows down to a coastline and onto the ocean surface. Ice shelves are only found in Antarctica, Greenland, Northern Canada, and the Russian Arctic. The boundary between the floating ice shelf and the anchor ice that feeds it is the grounding line. The thickness of ice shelves can range from about 100 m (330 ft) to 1,000 m (3,300 ft).
The Transantarctic Mountains comprise a mountain range of uplifted rock in Antarctica which extend, with some interruptions, across the continent from Cape Adare in northern Victoria Land to Coats Land. These mountains divide East Antarctica and West Antarctica. They include a number of separately named mountain groups, which are often again subdivided into smaller ranges.
The Western Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is the segment of the continental ice sheet that covers West Antarctica, the portion of Antarctica on the side of the Transantarctic Mountains that lies in the Western Hemisphere. The WAIS is classified as a marine-based ice sheet, meaning that its bed lies well below sea level and its edges flow into floating ice shelves. The WAIS is bounded by the Ross Ice Shelf, the Ronne Ice Shelf, and outlet glaciers that drain into the Amundsen Sea.
McMurdo Sound is a sound in Antarctica. The sound, which extends about 55 kilometres long and wide, connects to the Ross Sea to the north, and to the Ross Ice Shelf cavity to the south via Haskell Strait. The strait is largely covered by the McMurdo Ice Shelf. The Royal Society Range rises from sea level to 4,205 metres on the western shoreline. Ross Island, an historic jumping-off point for polar explorers, designates the eastern boundary. The active volcano Mount Erebus at 3,794 metres dominates Ross Island. Antarctica's's largest scientific base, the United States' McMurdo Station, as well as the New Zealand Scott Base are on the southern shore of the island. Less than 10 percent of McMurdo Sound's shoreline is free of ice. It is the southernmost navigable body of water in the world.
The United States Antarctic Program is an organization of the United States government which has presence in the Antarctica continent. Founded in 1959, the USAP manages all U.S. scientific research and related logistics in Antarctica as well as aboard ships in the Southern Ocean.
Iceberg B-15 was the largest recorded iceberg by area. It measured around 295 by 37 kilometres, with a surface area of 11,000 square kilometres. Calved from the Ross Ice Shelf of Antarctica in March 2000, Iceberg B-15 broke up into smaller icebergs, the largest of which was named Iceberg B-15-A. In 2003, B-15A drifted away from Ross Island into the Ross Sea and headed north, eventually breaking up into several smaller icebergs in October 2005. In 2018, a large piece of the original iceberg was steadily moving northward, located between the Falkland Islands and South Georgia Island. As of 2021, the U.S. National Ice Center (USNIC) still lists one extant piece of B-15 that meets the minimum threshold for tracking. This iceberg, B-15ab, measures 20 km × 7 km ; it is currently grounded off the coast of Antarctica in the western sector of the Amery region.
The Drygalski Ice Tongue or Drygalski Barrier or Drygalski Glacier Tongue is a glacier in Antarctica, on the Scott Coast, in the northern McMurdo Sound of Antarctica's Ross Dependency, 240 kilometres (150 mi) north of Ross Island. The Drygalski Ice Tongue is stable by the standards of Antarctica's icefloes, and stretches 70 kilometres (43 mi) out to sea from the David Glacier, reaching the sea from a valley in the Prince Albert Mountains of Victoria Land. The Drygalski Ice Tongue ranges from 14 to 24 kilometres wide.
Pine Island Glacier (PIG) is a large ice stream, and the fastest melting glacier in Antarctica, responsible for about 25% of Antarctica's ice loss. The glacier ice streams flow west-northwest along the south side of the Hudson Mountains into Pine Island Bay, Amundsen Sea, Antarctica. It was mapped by the United States Geological Survey (USGS) from surveys and United States Navy (USN) air photos, 1960–66, and named by the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names (US-ACAN) in association with Pine Island Bay.
Thwaites Glacier, also known as the Doomsday Glacier, is an unusually broad and vast Antarctic glacier flowing into Pine Island Bay, part of the Amundsen Sea, east of Mount Murphy, on the Walgreen Coast of Marie Byrd Land. Its surface speeds exceed 2 kilometres per year near its grounding line. Its fastest flowing grounded ice is centered between 50 and 100 kilometres east of Mount Murphy. In 1967, the Advisory Committee on Antarctic Names named the glacier after Fredrik T. Thwaites (1883–1961), a glacial geologist, geomorphologist and professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. The historian Reuben Gold Thwaites was his father.
Anchor ice is defined by the World Meteorological Organization as "submerged ice attached or anchored to the bottom, irrespective of the nature of its formation". It may also be called bottom-fast ice. Anchor ice is most commonly observed in fast-flowing rivers during periods of extreme cold, at the mouths of rivers flowing into very cold seawater, in the shallow sub or intertidal during or after storms when the air temperature is below the freezing point of the water, and the subtidal in the Antarctic along ice shelves or near floating glacier tongues, and in shallow lakes.
The Erebus Ice Tongue is a mountain outlet glacier and the seaward extension of Erebus Glacier from Ross Island. It projects 11 kilometres (6.8 mi) into McMurdo Sound from the Ross Island coastline near Cape Evans, Antarctica. The glacier tongue varies in thickness from 50 metres (160 ft) at the snout to 300 metres (980 ft) at the point where it is grounded on the shoreline. Explorers from Robert F. Scott's Discovery Expedition (1901–1904) named and charted the ice tongue.
Haskell Strait refers to the ocean passage in southern McMurdo Sound, running between Cape Armitage, Ross Island and Cape Spencer-Smith, White Island, Antarctica. Oceanographically, it separates McMurdo Sound from the ocean basin beneath the Ross Ice Shelf. The Strait itself is around 25 km wide and in places over 900 m deep. Currents of nearly half a knot have been measured in the Strait, although typical flows are lower. It is mostly covered by the ice of the McMurdo Ice Shelf and fast ice in southern McMurdo Sound. On rare occasions sea-ice breakout exposes the north-west corner of the Strait which becomes navigable and vessels can actually moor off Scott Base.
Robin Elizabeth Bell is Palisades Geophysical Institute (PGI) Lamont Research Professor at Columbia University's Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory and a past President of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), 2019–2021. Dr. Bell was influential in co-ordinating the 2007 International Polar Year and was the first woman to chair the National Academy of Sciences Polar Research Board. She has made numerous important discoveries with regard to subglacial lakes and ice sheet dynamics, and has a ridge, called Bell Buttress, in Antarctica named after her.
Christina Riesselman is an American paleoceanographer whose research focus is on Southern Ocean response to changing climate.
Patricia Jean Langhorne is an Antarctic sea ice researcher. She retired as Professor in the physics department at the University of Otago, New Zealand in 2020. She was previously head of department (2012–2015). She was New Zealand's leading sea ice physicist. For a time she led the observational component of one of New Zealand’s National Science Challenges – the Deep South.
Timothy George Haskell is a New Zealand scientist.
Gabby O'Connor is an Australian Installation Artist based in Wellington, New Zealand.
Kirsteen Jane Tinto is a glaciologist known for her research on the behavior and subglacial geology of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.