Dr. Emilie Beaudon will be giving a seminar talk titled “Melting Messengers: How Human Impact on Climate is Inscribed and Erased from the Chemistry of Glaciers” at Otterbein University for the Lifelong Learning Community.
The last 145 years (1880-2026), also referred as the “Anthropocene”, have been marked by a strong increase of global surface air temperature (+ 1.1°C) which was unambiguously forced by the exponential increase of anthropogenic greenhouse gases emissions to the atmosphere since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution around 1850 CE. This modern warming trend and the related environmental changes should be interpreted in the long-term context of the past to distinguish anthropogenic forcing from natural factors. Ice cores are wonderful archives of past climate and environmental changes as they contain physical and chemical records of variable length and time resolution, making them cornerstones of global change research. Dr. Emilie Beaudon is an ice core paleoclimatologist and an assistant professor at The Ohio State University’s School of Earth Sciences. Her research focuses on extracting multi-century records of mineral dust, black carbon, and trace element atmospheric contamination within deep ice cores retrieved from Polar and mid-latitude glaciers. She will discuss the significance of climate records from mountain glaciers and present some of her recent work in Tibet and in the Peruvian Andes. The multiple challenges faced by ice core paleoclimatologists will also be explored: from the retrieval of the ice to the establishment of its chronology; from the records interpretation to the quest to a new drilling site, and the future of this field of research in a warming world where the cryosphere is vanishing.
Dr. Emilie Beaudon is an ice core chemist and an assistant professor at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center (School of Earth Sciences, The Ohio State University) where her research focuses on extracting multi-century records of black carbon, ions and trace element atmospheric contamination within deep ice cores retrieved from Polar and mid-latitude glaciers. She is currently leading an interdisciplinary project aimed at identifying the environmental ‘message’ carried by mineral dust entrapped in Tibetan glaciers and its link to the Indian Summer Monsoon- Westerlies interplay. A geoscientist by training, she has been conducting glaciology field research on ocean-atmosphere-anthroposphere-cryosphere linkages in polar and low latitudes regions, working in Adélie Land (Antarctica), the European High Arctic (Svalbard and Jan Mayen Island), the European Alps, and the Peruvian Andes. Before joining The Ohio State Ice Core Paleoclimatology Research Group, she earned her Ph.D. at the Arctic Centre of the University of Lapland (Rovaniemi, Finland), investigating the environmental signal contained in snow, firn, and multi-century ice core records from Svalbard. Prior to her graduate studies, she held the position of manager of the Glaciology Laboratory at the Dumont D’Urville station in Adélie Land and became the 10th French woman to overwinter in Antarctica.
For more information, please visit the Lifelong Learning Community at Otterbein website.
