“Asking really big questions and going after high-risk — but high-reward — science is worth it,” said ice core scientist Alison Criscitiello. “We can pull these things off.”
Criscitiello is speaking at 10:45 a.m. today in the Amphitheater with a presentation on climate change as seen from Canada’s highest peak, Mount Logan, for the Chautauqua Lecture Series week with National Geographic on “Water: Crisis, Beauty and Necessity.” She’ll discuss this topic through the lens of a project she led that created a climate record in that part of the North Pacific.
A National Geographic Explorer, Criscitiello has been a mountaineer her whole life and was awarded Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s first-ever Ph.D. in glaciology with support from her adviser, who was the only glaciologist on faculty there at the time.
“It was clear by the time I was getting to the end of my Ph.D. that I don’t know what my diploma was going to say, but it was going to say climatology or something. That wasn’t wrong, but it also wasn’t quite right,” Criscitiello said.
Criscitiello learned the secrets held by ice cores, gathered through high-altitude treks in near-impossible conditions. In 2021, she scaled Mount Logan to search for ideal ice core drill sites, and in 2022, she brought back a team of six others to extract a record-breaking, 327-meter ice core. Three members were forced to turn back due to altitude-related health issues.
To extract the climate record, ice core scientists like Criscitiello drill from the surface of a glacier to its base, and pull out cylinders of ice to make an age scale to reconstruct environmental conditions of the past.
“Our longest CO2 records from the past are from ice cores,” Criscitiello said. The group completed the drilling in 11 days, working in three-hour shifts, yielding data far beyond what the team expected.
“The most important and powerful thing that’s come out of my body of research has been showing the human imprint on some of the most remote parts of our planet and — tying in the water theme — this includes how we impact hydrological systems and water quality,” Criscitiello said. “When we think about snow falling in the Arctic or the Antarctic, it seems like such a pristine and untouched thing, but that snow carries with it chemical fingerprints of things that have been emitted from very far away sources.”
Even though, she said, “the Logan project was very unlikely to actually work, and it was more likely that it wouldn’t,” the science did pay off — and Criscitiello finds this niche area of science incredibly rewarding.
“I feel very driven to combine these things to position myself in this niche area of science that very few people can do,” Criscitiello said. “The science that can be done places is, in the end, what’s driving it, but a lot of it comes from that combination of being able to use all my skill sets.”
Leading the very first all-women’s ascent of 22,818-foot Lingsarmo Mountain, Criscitiello does everything she can to train and engage diverse groups of people in her field. As a young, queer woman in science, she believes it is imperative to do everything she can to provide opportunities to people who may not otherwise have them.
Besides, she said, “diverse groups of people do better science.”
In collaboration with fellow National Geographic Explorer Erin Pettit, Criscitiello co-founded Girls on Ice Canada to bring more women into the field. The program includes a two-week science expedition, and is for any female-identifying high school student.
“It’s half-driven by science and half-driven by teaching self-confidence and self-efficacy in the outdoors in a challenging, glaciated landscape,” Criscitiello said. “It’s led by female-identifying mountain guides and science instructors. We target mostly First Nations youth across Canada and other underrepresented, marginalized communities. For most things that exist in the world, your acceptance into them is based on previous achievement; in the case with this organization, it’s kind of the opposite.”
