Meet our guest editors

Ailsa Chung

Instituté of Geosciences and the Evironment, Universite Grenoble Alpes, France

Ailsa is doing her PhD in Grenoble on modeling the age of ice in Antarctica by constraining a numerical model with radar observations. She applies the model to predict the age of the ice that might be found at Little Dome C in Antarctica where there are two current ice-core drill sites from the European Beyond EPICA and the Australian Million Year Ice Core projects. When not modeling ice, she can be found climbing and camping in the mountains around Grenoble.

Niklas Kappelt

Department of Geology, Lund University, Sweden

Niklas is a PhD student who is researching a new dating method for ice cores. With a background in chemistry, he previously studied urban air pollution and worked on the development of devices for the removal of pollutants. He transitioned to paleoclimate studies because of his interest in the unique information accessible through ice cores. Dating is a crucial part for the analysis of this data, and his new method is based on cosmogenic radionuclides, which are created in the atmosphere and end up in the ice sheet where they radioactively decay over time.

Florian Painer

Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven, Germany

Florian studied geosciences in Graz, Austria. He is interested in the geological past and the dynamics of the Earth system. Currently he is doing a PhD in glaciology and his research is focuses on the microstructure of ice and how ancient air molecules get caged by the ice (i.e. water) molecules. His work has already taken him to the Greenland Ice Sheet. “Ice is a fascinating material to study and key to understanding the Earth’s past climate,” he said. In his free time, he enjoys hiking in the mountains and being in nature.

Climate and Environmental Physics, Physics Institute and Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Bern, Switzerland

Lison is a PhD student working on ice-core sciences. Her research focuses on nitrous oxide (N2O), a potent greenhouse gas and ozone-depleting substance. She analyzes air bubbles in Antarctic ice cores to reconstruct past atmospheric N2O concentrations, and to understand the production of N2O in ice using isotope analyses. This study is the result of an international measurement campaign in Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, and the United States. Additionally, Lison has a strong interest in science communication.