Evgeny Kovalev SPB/Shutterstock Kaitlin Naughten, British Antarctic Survey; Jan De Rydt, Northumbria University, Newcastle, and Paul Holland, British Antarctic Survey Originally published at The Conversation based on research published in Nature Climate Change The rate at which the warming Southern Ocean melts the West Antarctic ice sheet will speed up rapidly over the course of...

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After the publication of my previous post, I received an email from Dr Sian Grigg, who decided to leave academia following the completion of her PhD. Read on below to hear her story. Dear Kaitlin Thanks for thinking of us who did not continue! I have often thought about this question and still wonder, after 15 years, whether I should have tried harder to pursue a career in academia. And whether I might now try…

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“On International Women’s Day”, I wrote on 8 March, “why don’t we instead highlight women who left the workforce due to structural barriers? The current approach is a bit “let’s celebrate the women who navigated this broken system to distract from the fact that it’s broken”.” So far, I have been one of the women who is “celebrated” on days like this, with social media campaigns showcasing the work of women in science. I am…

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I wrote this article for Redefining Stammering, an excellent blog run by Sam Simpson (a speech therapist) and Patrick Campbell (a doctor and person who stammers). If you have an interest in stammering or disability theory, I encourage you to check out their work, and particularly their recent book Stammering Pride and Prejudice. When I was in primary school, I had a teacher who was over-enthusiastic about the virtues of touch-typing. Over the years, he…

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This blog is collaborating with researchers at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, who are conducting a survey of readers of climate blogs. They are investigating audiences’ views on climate change and their blog reading behaviour. Please see below a message from the lead researcher. Please share your views on climate change and reading blogs by filling out this survey. The data will be used for getting to know the readers of climate change blogs. What’s…

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Originally published at The Science Breaker Climate change is causing the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets to melt, which releases cold, fresh meltwater into the nearby ocean. This meltwater causes sea level rise, but a lesser-known side effect is the disruption of deep ocean currents and climate patterns worldwide. Our modelling study investigated these processes. You’ve probably heard that climate change is melting the polar ice caps – but what does this actually mean? It…

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For the first fourteen years of my life, I thought science was boring. As far as I could tell, science was a process of memorising facts: the order of the planets, the names of clouds, the parts of a cell. Sometimes science meant building contraptions out of paper and tape to allow an egg to survive a two-metre fall, and I was really terrible at that sort of thing. So instead I spent all my…

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The Weddell Polynya is a large hole in the sea ice of the Weddell Sea, near Antarctica. It occurs only very rarely in observations, but is extremely common in ocean models, many of which simulate a near-permanent polynya. My new paper published today in Journal of Climate finds that the Weddell Polynya increases melting beneath the nearby Filchner-Ronne Ice Shelf. This means it’s important to fix the polynya problems in ocean models, if we want…

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I’m a climate scientist, and I don’t worry about climate change very much. I think about it every day, but I don’t let it in. To me climate change is a fascinating math problem, a symphony unfolding both slowly and quickly before our very eyes. The consequences of this math problem, for myself and my family and our future, I keep locked in a tiny box in my brain. The box rarely gets opened. The…

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What exciting times we live in! The UK is stockpiling food and medicine as it charges willingly into a catastrophe of its own choosing. The next Australian prime minister is likely to be a man who has committed crimes against humanity. And America has descended so far into dystopia that it can’t even be summed up in one pithy sentence. I spend a lot of time wondering how future generations will look back upon this…

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