30 October 2008 Suffrage Award Winner Seeking to Unlock Record of Climate Change in Antarctic Deserts

 

Lincoln University doctoral student Fiona Shanhun always told her parents her ambition was to work in Antartica. Now a top New Zealand commemorative scholarsip is helping her live that dream.

“From the age of about nine I used to tell Mum and Dad that I wanted to work in Antarctica,” she says.

Four years ago Fiona had her first taste of life on the great Southern Continent doing research field work for her masters degree.

“It's an incredible landscape and I've worked hard to try to get back there.”

Fiona, a Lincoln University BSc (Honours) graduate with a masters degree from the University of Waikato, has been awarded the 2008 Kate Sheppard Memorial Trust Award to support her research work in Antarctica, studying the soils there as a means of unravelling the story of past climate conditions in the ice-free areas of the continent.

The award was made to Fiona by Cabinet Minister and Christchurch East MP the Hon Lianne Dalziel at a ceremony in Christchurch in September marking Women's Suffrage Day.

Fiona, who describes herself as an outdoors person with a love of skiing, tramping, the mountains and everything connected with nature, says her interest in Antarctica has never waned.

She says her parents would often ask what she wanted to do in Antarctica, count penguins? But at Lincoln University, after embarking on a biochemistry degree, she discovered soil science and everything began to come together  -  her love of the outdoors, the fascination of a discipline area which links all the key sciences, and the realisation that here was a field with great scope for application in Antarctica.

“A lot of people think of Antarctica in terms of ice and snow, but there are also ice-free areas covered with soil. These make up about two percent of the Continent and contain very dry ancient landscapes.

“You can look at the soils there to try to understand past climate conditions,” says Fiona.

“The extreme dryness of these polar deserts allows the accumulation of soluble compounds that are normally washed out of soils in more humid climates.

“These compounds record aspects of past environments, like atmospheric circulation and composition, soil biological activity and even temperature. It's fascinating.”

Working with Lincoln University soil scientists Dr Tim Clough, Dr Carol Smith and Dr Peter Almond, together with Professor Jim Bockheim from the United States of America,  Fiona's field sites will be some of Antarctica's ice-free, soil-covered areas. This year she will work in the Darwin Glacier region as part of the Latitudinal Gradient Project (LGP),  and the McMurdo Dry Valleys where she will collect samples of salts formed in soils up to 50,000 years old.

In particular, Fiona will be analysing calcium carbonate in the soils in order to determine the ratios of carbon and oxygen isotopes. The behaviour of these isotopes is influenced by temperature during the formation of calcium carbonate, so this makes it possible for scientists to calculate the temperature at which the carbonate formed.

The Dry Valleys of Antarctica offer a unique environment in which to carry out this research. Very few plants and animals can survive the harsh conditions, which means the composition of salts in the soils is largely free from the influence of plant and biological activity.

Fiona says it is a great honour to receive the Kate Sheppard Memorial Trust Award. She will use the proceeds to buy equipment needed for her Antarctic fieldwork and to help pay her PhD fees.

Lincoln University's Vice-Chancellor, Professor Roger Field, says he is delighted by the award to Fiona as it highlights the importance of research into climate change, an issue with important implications for many of the land-based disciplines studied at Lincoln University.

“It also supports an emerging cluster of Antarctic-related activity at Lincoln University for which the university is winning a reputation.”

The Chair of the Kate Sheppard Memorial Trust, Karena Brown, says the Trust is always delighted to assist talented women to achieve their dreams and the work of this year's recipient will be very important to New Zealand as well as overseas.

“We are sure that Kate Sheppard would be proud for her name to be associated with such a worthwhile area of study.”