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| 2001 Team |
Tom Neumann
Field Assistant
University of Washington
Seattle, Washington
Hello, my name is Tom Neumann. I am a fifth-year graduate student working with Ed Waddington at the University of Washington, here in Seattle. I will be trading places with Dave Schneider, and participating in the second half of the traverse. Eric Steig (also at the University of Washington) asked me to fill in for him this year, as he was unable to make the trip. I will be a field assistant, and help out where ever I can be useful. I will also be collecting snow samples for analysis of the stable isotopes of oxygen and hydrogen in the snow. The isotopes preserved in polar snow are used to help understand how climate has changed in the past. By restricting our analysis to near-surface snow samples (which fell in the recent past as snow), we will study how climate has changed in the past few centuries.
I came to Seattle in 1996 from the University of Chicago, where I earned my undergraduate degree in Geophysical Science. My primary focus in graduate school has been ice flow and ice dynamics, but recently my focus has changed to include processes happening at the snow surface. My Ph.D.project focuses on how geochemical information (impurities, stable isotopes, ions) is incorporated and preserved in snow, so these snow samples from the traverse will be very useful for me.
This will be in my second trip to Antarctica. I first went during the 1997-8 field season with my advisor, Ed Waddington, and another student -H.P. Marshall. On that trip, we went to a site called Taylor Dome, which is in East Antarctica, not far from McMurdo Station. I'm really looking forward to meeting a new group of people on the trip and participating in what promises to be a really good time!
