Alison Criscitiello

Up until a few years ago, I would’ve explained the impact of my work solely by the contributions I’ve made to the fields of climate and ice core science. I have developed new proxies in Antarctica and the Arctic that allow us to reconstruct sea ice and sea surface conditions in the past, and I have drilled ice cores across the Canadian high Arctic and the Canadian Rockies that have allowed us to look at various environmental contaminants in remote environments. But in more recent years, I have spent time not just doing this science but also communicating it to wider audiences, which I think has magnified the impact that I have.

The high-altitude ice coring work that I do is high-risk, but is incredibly engaging and has brought a platform of science communication that has allowed me to broaden my impact. I aim to motivate women and girls to pursue STEM careers, contributing to a more diverse and innovative scientific community. And I aim to inspire a diversity of passionate people to take actionable steps and participate in climate advocacy, fostering a broader movement. I am very proud to have founded, and co-direct, Girls on Ice Canada. It is equally important to me to continue contributing to our body of knowledge in the climate sciences, as it is to work on these deeper issues of equity, diversity and inclusion in STEM.

I came to ice core science via a circuitous route. After my undergraduate degree in Earth & Environmental Science, I became a US Climbing Ranger and worked as a mountain guide on Denali and Aconcagua. My years as a climbing ranger were formative; I fell in love with the glaciers that I lived and worked on, and became intimately aware of the change I was seeing in these landscapes that I learned to call home. After several years, I wanted to understand the change I was seeing and decided to go to graduate school, starting in polar oceanography, but learned pretty quickly that while I loved being at sea in Antarctica, the ice sheet was where my heart was.

My first year drilling ice cores across the Amundsen Coast of West Antarctica was it for me. I knew I had found my thing, and there was no going back. Since that time, these two separate parts of my life (ice core science and high-altitude mountaineering) remained separate. I took a break from one to go all in on the other. It has only been in more recent years, forging my own research plan and group and directing the national ice core lab here in Canada, that I have been able to merge these two passions. It has been a dream come true.