Ice Core Paleoclimatology Group Members

More about Lonnie Thompson:

Full Vita    Short Vita

Ice Man: Lonnie Thompson (written by Kevin Krajick, Science, October 18, 2002)

El Nino: Unlocking the Secrets of the Master Weather-Maker by Madeline Nash, Warner Books.

Victor studies the hydro-thermal regime, and the structure of polar and sub-polar glaciers in the Eurasian Arctic. Data derived from deep ice cores were used to reconstruct climatic conditions on Svalbard and Severnaya Zemlaya during the last 4000 years. Currently Victor is preparing for a deep ice coring project on Graham Bell Island, Franz Jozef Land (Russia). It is anticipated that the paleoclimatic history from the new core will contribute to the completion of the Holocene history of the Eurasian Arctic. Victor is also developing new methods for continuous ice core analyses, ice core drilling and borehole logging. Victor has participated in over 20 expeditions in the Arctic and Antarctic as well as on numerous mountains glaciers in Russia, Africa, China and Bolivia. His thermal-alcohol drill system was used in May 2002 to recover a 460-meter long core to bedrock on the Bona-Churchill col in the Wrangell-St. Elias Mountains of southeastern Alaska.

Liz came to OSU in 2005 and joined the Ice Core Group as a Masters student.  She previously received a B.A. from Vanderbilt University with a double major in Geology and English.  Her research interests involve stable isotopes in tropical ice cores as recorders of temperature and precipitation.  Last summer Liz spent time in the field studying the Quelccaya Ice Cap in Peru.

Aron joined the ice core research group in 2005 after graduating from Colgate University. His undergraduate research focused on using the diatom record to reconstruct Holocene climate variability of the northeastern Antarctic Peninsula. Presently, Aron is studying changes in the mid-Holocene climate of South America. Aron’s work has taken him to the former Larsen B Ice Shelf region of the Antarctic Peninsula and to the Quelccaya Ice Cap in Peru.

Natalie Kehrwald came to OSU in Fall Quarter, 2004 as a Ph. D student in the Department of Geological Sciences.  Before coming to OSU, Natalie studied stable isotopes in precipitation at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Natalie also served for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer on the Bolivian altiplano where she created a municipal radio station and analyzed local water supplies.

Matt joined the group in February 2007 to construct paleoclimate records from molecular organic matter trapped in ice. As part of his graduate study, Matt employed biomarkers in marine sediments and ice to investigate tropical climate variability since the last glacial period, with an emphasis on abrupt changes in ENSO. His interests involve expanding the range of climate information available from stratigraphic archives through organic geochemical analyses and developing new analytical techniques.

In the Spring of 2005, David Urmann joined the ice core group as a Ph.D. student. His thesis will focus on reconstructing the history of ENSO events from the Bona Churchill (Alaska) and Quelccaya (Peru) ice cores.

Lijia Wei came to OSU in Fall Quarter, 2004 as a Ph.D. student in the Department of Geography's Climate and Atmospheric Sciences Program. Lijia is the recipient of a University Fellowship. Her Ph.D. research project will include the reconstruction of the history of volcanically derived sulfate fluxes as recorded in Greenland ice cores.

Jihong Cole-Dai

Now Assistant Professor in Chemistry at South Dakota State University

Click to visit Jihong's web site

email: Jihong_Cole-Dai@sdstate.edu

Dr. Duan takes an interdisciplinary approach to investigating climatic and environmental change. His specific interests are in the recovery of climatic and environmental records from snow and ice in the high mountains, particularly those in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan Plateau. His current research focuses on the reconstruction of Indian Monsoon variability. In addition he has surveyed glacier variations on the Tibetan Plateau and participated in 10 field expeditions to the high glaciers of Tibet. Dr. Duan will spend 18 months at the Byrd Polar Research Center.

P. Ross Edwards

Now Assistant Research Professor at the Desert Research Institute (DRI) in Reno, Nevada.

email: Ross.Edwards@dri.edu

YC Fang, a native of Taiwan, came to United States in 1995 after receiving his B.S. degree in Civil Engineering from National Taiwan University. In 1998, he received his M.S. degree in Applied Statistics from The Ohio State University (OSU), after which he joined the research group of Frank Schwartz, Eminent Scholar in the Geology Department at OSU. His first project was the 3-D in-situ destruction of chlorinated contaminant by oxidation flooding scheme in a simulated groundwater system. In 2000, his advisor inspired him to shift gears to research on scientific impact analysis using data mining techniques. His started to combine his background in statistics with data mining to discover interesting patterns in citation data.

In October 2004 YC joined the Ice Core Paleoclimatology Research Group as a Comer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow. His research focuses on ice core data assimilation and the development of mathematical and statistical methods for extracting spatial and temporal climate patterns from these unique, long-term paleoclimatic datasets. In addition to his scientific interests, YC is also an active choral singer in the University.

Meredith is interested in investigating the extent and timing of changes in glacial systems. She has conducted research in various glacial and formerly glacial environments, such as New England, the Dry Valleys of Antarctica and the Swiss Alps. For her dissertation research she reconstructed the ice-surface geometry of the last glacial maximum ice sheet in the western Swiss Alps based on trimlines and other glacial erosional features. She also applied the surface exposure dating method, in particular the cosmogenic radionuclides ¹⁰Be and ²⁶Al, to determine the age of deglaciation from the high trimlines and other glacial features in the Alps.

As an Ohio State University Postdoctoral Fellow at the Byrd Polar Research Center, Meredith used the surface exposure method to date moraine systems in the Peruvian Andes, near the sites of ice cores recovered by Dr. Lonnie Thompson and the Ice-Core Paleoclimatology Research Group.

Sangsuk majored in material science and engineering for his bachelor's and master's degrees at POSTECH, a top-ranked university in Korea. His incessant passion for better environmental conservation was his primary motivation for attaining his Ph.D. in Environmental Science. His doctoral research was conducted under the Ohio Eminent Scholar in Geological Sciences, Frank Schwartz, involved in elucidating geochemical responses of urban streams to storms from chemical hydrologic perspectives.

Sangsuk joined the Ice Core Paleoclimatology Research Group as a Comer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow. He has been developing protocols for the analysis of black carbon (along with organic carbon) preserved in ice cores with the goals of addressing anthropogenic emissions over the last few hundred years and reconstructing fire histories over thousands of years. As another project, he has completed the melt layer stratigraphy of the Quelccaya and Coropuna ice cores recovered in 2003 from the high tropical, southwestern Andes of Peru, and the results are going to be compared with other ice core proxies (i.e., stable isotopes) for better understanding of the trends of regionally-averaged surface temperatures. In addition, he has been attempting to assess the potential hydrologic impact that the ongoing disappearance of tropical glaciers in South America and East Africa will have on the water sources and ecosystems in the watersheds of the glaciers by employing the isotopic geochemistry of the snow that currently accumulates on the glaciers. One of his long-term goals is to investigate novel methods for effective carbon sequestration to moderate future anthropogenic warming of the Earth.

Zhongqin Li

Zhongqin Li is now Director of the Tianshan Glaciological Station, Chinese Academy of Sciences. The Station supports 17 scientists and staff and operates year round. The Station web page is under development.

email: lizq@ns.lzb.ac.cn

Wang's research interests include paleoclimatic reconstruction from the chemical and physical properties preserved in ice cores, correlation between the solar activity and the Earth's climate, the relationship of climatic changes in different areas, glacier fluctuations and the impact on water resources. He has conducted ice core drilling programs on the Tibetan Plateau and participated in glacier-water resource programs in western China. He has participated in over 10 expeditions to the high mountains for glaciological field studies. His research investigations have lead to development of a statistical model of the steady-state response of a mountain glacier to climate change, and provided evidence for the existence of sunspot cycles during the Maunder Minimum. Wang has found that during the Last Glacial Maximum the amplitude of the temperature decrease becomes enhanced with increasing altitude in the equatorial regions, and that the concentration of nitrate in the Guliya ice core from the Tibetan Plateau is positively correlated with solar activity.

Dr. Wu, a Visiting Scholar at BPRC, is a Postdoctoral Fellow from the Laboratory of Ice Core and Cold Regions Environment, Cold and Arid Regions Environmental and Engineering Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences. Dr. Wu's research focuses on Central Asian atmospheric dust in ice cores recovered from the Tibetan Plateau and from loess sections in northwest China. He has participated in many Chinese ice core drilling programs and field expeditions to sample loess sections.

Todd Albert

M.A. Geography (Atmospheric Sciences), The Ohio State University

B.S. in Geography, University of Florida, 1998

email: todd.albert@colorado.edu

Todd's Master's Thesis research uses remote sensing technique to monitor the retreat of tropical alpine glaciers. He has been funded as a teaching assistant in Geography and Atmospheric Sciences. Todd has also conducted research on the response in summer rainfall in Florida during extreme ENSO events, and worked as a research assistant on several other studies. His academic interests include paleoclimatology, climatological teleconnections, remote sensing, and natural hazards.
Todd's personal web page

Deborah Bathke

Ph.D., Atmospheric Sciences, Department of Geography, The Ohio State University, March, 2004.

Dissertation Title: "Meteorological controls on the variability of net accumulation over Greenland."

M.S. Geosciences, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, August, 1998

B.S., Meteorology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, December, 1995/p>

Office phone: (505) 646-6327

E-mail: cocorahs@weather.nmsu.edu

Deb is now the Assistant State Climatologist for New Mexico. She is in the Department of Agronomy and Horticulture.

Amanda Cavin

M.S. Geology, Department of Geological Sciences, The Ohio State University, 2003

B.S. Geology from the University of Missouri-Columbia, 1999

E-mail: cavin.13@osu.edu

Amanda's thesis research involved mapping and dating moraines in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, Alaska near the Bona-Churchill ice core site. She used remote sensing techniques and radiocarbon dating to determine glacier advance and retreat history. The glacial geologic history will ultimately be correleated to the ice core history being reconstructed from the 460-meter core collected in May 2002 from the Bona-Churchill col.

Brent Christner

After graduation Brent had a postdoctoral position with Dr. John Priscu at Montana State University for several years and in 2006 he joined the faculty of the Department of Biological Sciences at Louisiana State University.

Visit Brent's webpage

Paul V. Dickfoss

Paul V. Dickfoss received his M.S. in Geological Science (1996) under the direction of Lonnie G. Thompson. His thesis title is "Stratified ice accumulations as a source of proxy climate data."

Robert Hellström

Rob Hellström received his M.S. degree in the Atmospheric Science Program of the Department of Geography (1995) under the direction of Ellen Mosley-Thompson. His thesis title is "The abrupt spring temerature rise and pressure increase over the Greenland Ice Sheet". Rob completed his Ph.D. in Atmospheric Sciences under the direction of John Arnfield (Department of Geography).

E-mail: rhellstrom@bridgew.edu

Visit Rob's web page

Keith A. Henderson

Ph. D., Geological Sciences, The Ohio State University, 2002

M.S. in Geological Science, The Ohio State University, 1996

B.S. in Chemistry, The Pennsylvania State University, May 1986

email: keith.henderson@psi.ch

Keith's Master's thesis is entitled "The El Niño Southern Oscillation and other modes of interannual tropical climate variability as recorded in ice cores from the Nevado Huascarán col, Peru" and his dissertation is entitled "An Ice Core Paleoclimate Study of Windy Dome, Franz Josef Land (Russia): Development of a Recent Climate History for the Barents Sea."

Keith left Ohio State for a postdoctoral position at Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland where he continued the previous work at Uvi-Berne by V. Lavanchy in extending the paleorecord of carbonaceous particle deposition from Alpine ice cores, as well as beginning this analysis on other cores from both the Altai and Andes mountain ranges. Black (or 'Elemental') carbon in the atmosphere has recently been understood to be a major factor in the total radiation budget of the global atmosphere as it responds to new input sources in the "anthropogenic era."

Jeff Johnson

M.A., Climatology, Department of Geography, The Ohio State University, 2003

Thesis Title: "Volcanic signatures in Greenland ice cores: An investigation of the volcano-climate connection with an emphasis on the Laki Eruption."

B.S.E., Mechanical Engineering, University of Maryland Baltimore County, 1993

E-mail: johnson.980@osu.edu

Neil Mackinnon

Neil Mackinnon received his M.A. in the Department of Geography (1997) under the direction of Ellen Mosley-Thompson. His thesis title is "The application of remote sensing and geographic information system technologies to the monitoring of montane glaciers: A case study of the Quelccaya Ice Cap, Peru". Neil has returned to Scotland to pursue a career in the area of GIS technologies.

Bryan Mark

Bryan Mark received his M.A. in the Department of Geography (Climatology, 1995) under the direction of Ellen Mosley-Thompson. His thesis title is "Temporal and spatial analysis of South Pole snow accumulation." Bryan received his Ph.D. at Syracuse University under the direction of Geoffrey Seltzer. In 2004 Bryan joined the faculty in the Department of Geography at The Ohio State University.

email: mark.9@osu.edu

Visit Bryan's web page

Chris Readinger

M.S. Atmospheric Sciences, Department of Geography, The Ohio State University, 2003

Thesis Title: The North Atlantic and Pacific Oscillations and Their Imprint on Greenland’s Climate Record.

B.S. in Meteorology from Millersville University, Pennsylvania- December 2000

E-mail: creadinger@yahoo.com

After graduation, Chris took a job with CSA in Bethesda, Maryland.