Luisa Fontanot
Geologist
University of Otago
PhD Candidate
Luisa is a PhD candidate working on sediment cores from the Little America Basin. She is using organic geochemistry proxies to reconstruct past sea surface temperature and paleo sea ice extent in the Eastern sector of the Ross Sea. Luisa will use the data to reconstruct the retreat of the Ross Ice Shelf after the last Glacial Maximum – Holocene (12,000 years).
The stability of the Antarctic Ice Sheet is under threat from accelerated Southern Ocean warming and increased advection of warm water beneath the ice shelves. Studying past climatic events archived in geological records can provide that crucial missing information to assess the vulnerability of the ice sheets.
Supervision of this work is being undertaken by the University of Otago’s Department of Geology, the Department of Mathematics and Earth Sciences at the University of Trieste, Italy, and GNS Science.