As Chief Scientist for the Australian Antarctic Program, I am focusing on implementing our new Decadal Science Strategy and bringing together the scientific expertise from across the Australian Antarctic research community, to deliver scientific excellence and influence.
My research expertise has spanned from Antarctica to the tropical oceans, where I have studied past climate variability, recent human-caused climate changes, and the implications for future Australian climate risks. I received my science degree in Earth Sciences and Marine Sciences from the University of Sydney, and through my PhD at the Australian National University, I specialised in past climate reconstructions using the chemistry of fossil corals from the eastern Indian Ocean.
My path into Antarctic research began when I joined the British Antarctic Survey in 2004 as an ice core scientist. I was part of the team that drilled the James Ross Island ice core in 2008. We discovered that the Antarctic Peninsula is warming very rapidly, resulting in a 10-fold increase summer ice melt in that area of Antarctica.
I returned to Australia in 2011 as a researcher at the Australian National University. I built a research team there studying the history of the Indian Ocean Dipole – a climate phenomenon that causes droughts and fire weather in southeast Australia. Following Australia’s Black Summer fires in 2019/2020, I brought together the climate and fire research communities to deliver a rapid review into the combination of natural and human-caused climate conditions that led to this disaster. I also led international science coordination through the PAGES 2k Network, bringing together hundreds of researchers to develop open-access databases of paleoclimate records, and identifying the earliest signals of human-caused climate warming across the globe. I helped to lead the IPCC Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate, including working with governments through the approval session for the report in 2019. I am now helping to lead the IPCC 7th Assessment Report on the Physical Basis of Climate Change that is due to be completed in 2027.
My contributions to the Australian Antarctic Program have included being part of the international teams that drilled the Aurora Basin ice core in East Antarctica in 2013/14, and the Mount Brown South ice core in 2017/18. Most recently, I led a team investigating the history of the rapidly retreating Denman Glacier, which contains enough ice to raise global sea levels by 1.5 metres. We used a fast and light-weight technique to drill ice chips from which to extract water ‘isotopes’ (different molecular forms of water) and trace chemicals trapped in the ice. These will provide information on how the climate and atmosphere has changed over time and allow us to reconstruct the region’s climate history.
I took up the role of Chief Scientist at the Australian Antarctic Division in 2025.
Representations
Publications
Abram, N.J., Purich, A., England, M.H. et al. Emerging evidence of abrupt changes in the Antarctic environment. Nature 644, 621–633 (2025).
Devanand, A., et al., Australia’s Tinderbox Drought: An extreme natural event likely worsened by human-caused climate change. Sci. Adv.10, eadj3460 (2024).
Stokes, C.R., Abram, N.J., Bentley, M.J. et al. Response of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet to past and future climate change. Nature 608, 275–286 (2022).
Abram, N.J., Henley, B.J., Sen Gupta, A. et al. Connections of climate change and variability to large and extreme forest fires in southeast Australia. Commun Earth Environ 2, 8 (2021).
Abram, N.J., Wright, N.M., Ellis, B. et al. Coupling of Indo-Pacific climate variability over the last millennium. Nature 579, 385–392 (2020).
Abram, N., McGregor, H., Tierney, J. et al. Early onset of industrial-era warming across the oceans and continents. Nature 536, 411–418 (2016).
See more of Prof. Abram’s publications on Google Scholar.