Dr Lenneke Jong: BSc (Hons), BE (Software), PhD
Research interests
My research uses climate records from ice cores to study the variability of the earth’s climate system and how the cryosphere responds to changes. Combining the measurements of isotopes, trace chemistry and physical properties of the ice from cores, and calibrating against modern observational climate datasets, we can reconstruct longer records of climate variables. For example, we can use snow accumulation to investigate how the climate has changed in the past, and how this affects the mass balance and stability of the Antarctic ice sheet.
I am a physicist and software engineer by training, receiving my PhD from the University of Melbourne in 2011. Since then I have worked across a broad range of fields of research, developing scientific software and databases at the Heidelberg Institute of Theoretical Studies in Germany and the Australian Synchrotron. I turned to glaciology as a postdoc in ice sheet modelling with the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre and Antarctic Gateway Partnership before joining the ice cores group at the Australian Antarctic Division in 2018.
My work has taken me to Antarctica a number of times, including ice coring at Law Dome, and the airborne geophysical survey project ICECAP which links the climate data recorded by ice cores with broader ice sheet dynamics. The measurements of the ice sheet and what lies beneath it is helps to inform selection of sites for future ice core drilling. It also assists in the development of age scales of ice core records and allows us to interpret them over larger spatial extent to study past behaviour of the ice sheet.