It’s a trifecta of success for the Antarctic Research Centre (ARC) at Victoria University of Wellington, which is home to three researchers who are recipients of one of New Zealand’s most prestigious fellowships.

Dr Rob McKay, Associate Professor Nancy Bertler and Dr Nick Golledge

Associate Professor Nancy Bertler and Drs Rob McKay and Nick Golledge have each been awarded Rutherford Discovery Fellowships, which are aimed at talented early-to mid-career scientists and are worth up to $800,000 over five years. The fellowships are administered by the Royal Society of New Zealand.

The ARC, which is co-located with Victoria’s School of Geography, Environment and Earth Sciences in the Faculty of Science and is a team of sixteen staff, was established in 1972 to research Antarctic earth sciences with a particular focus on Antarctic ice sheet and climate processes and how they influence New Zealand and the global climate system.

Twelve Rutherford Discovery Fellowships are awarded annually, according to stringent criteria.

“You’ve got to have proven research excellence and have made your mark both nationally and internationally in your field,” says Professor Tim Naish, Director of the ARC. “It’s also about leadership—these young researchers are becoming research leaders in their respective areas. The Fellowships allow this top talent to achieve their potential to make a big contribution to New Zealand down the track. I’m very proud of each of them.”

Nancy Bertler, who was awarded her fellowship in 2011, has used it to advance research on ice core science, a discipline she introduced to New Zealand when she arrived from Germany in 1999 to study under the ARC’s Professor Peter Barrett.

For her fellowship, Nancy has been the Chief Scientist on the international Roosevelt Island Climate Evolution (RICE) project, a $12 million ice coring project that has had major logistical support from Antarctica New Zealand and which examines ice core samples from a dome in the Ross Ice Shelf. “These samples go back 70,000 years, which includes a time when Earth recovered from the last ice age. Then global temperature increased by six degrees Celsius and the global sea level rose by around 120 metres as the vast ice sheets covering the northern hemisphere melted and Antarctica shrank,” Nancy explains. “Looking at these records can show us what might happen to the current ice sheets as temperatures rise further and how their response will impact sea levels around New Zealand’s coastline and elsewhere.

“The results we’re seeing show that Antarctica is more sensitive than we thought, and will react perhaps with greater consequences than we anticipated.”

Nancy, who holds a joint position at the ARC and GNS Science, says the Rutherford Discovery Fellowship has given her the flexibility to take part in a number of international collaborations, including co-chairing a large project for the Scientific Council on Antarctic Research (SCAR) which aims to improve projections on how the Antarctic and Southern Ocean environments will change over the twenty-first Century and beyond.

“The SCAR project brings together biologists, climate modellers and paleoclimate scientists, which has proved to be a really valuable network,” says Associate Professor Bertler. “The Fellowship has given me a lot more capacity to take a leadership role in this sort of international-level strategy.”

Rob McKay, who was awarded the Rutherford Discovery Fellowship in 2013, is regarded as one of the world’s top glacial sedimentologists. He gathers marine sedimentary records and glacial deposits to reconstruct episodes of melting and cooling in Antarctica over millions of years.

Rob is about halfway through his Fellowship project and has already successfully led a proposal to have the International Ocean Discovery Program scientific drilling ship come to drill in the Antarctic to gain more detailed data. His expedition to the Ross Sea is scheduled for January 2018.

“To get a drilling ship down to Antarctica costs about $US16 million and takes a fair bit of organising—it means you have to get to some far-flung places at fairly short notice to keep the ball rolling. I wouldn’t be able to do that without some sort of support such as a Rutherford Discovery Fellowship, which gives me the freedom to travel when necessary and to take advantage of opportunities as they arise.”

Another aspect of Rob’s fellowship is helping to establish a geochemistry laboratory based at GNS Science and run in conjunction with Victoria. “That will allow us to look at molecular fossils using a mass spectrometer—rather than analysing a whole shell or bone, you can look at just a single molecule. The chemical compounds and isotopes present within them can tell you a lot about the environment the oragnism once lived in, such as ocean temperature, salinity, air temperature and rainfall.

“This laboratory has a lot of promise and will have some valuable through-put in years to come—the Rutherford Discovery Fellowship has allowed me to help set up that kind of long-term capability.”

Nick Golledge was awarded the Fellowship in 2015 to continue his cutting-edge research that uses computer modelling to predict Antarctic ice sheet stability. Although his latest project is just getting underway, he’s already seeing the benefits of the Fellowship.

“It means I can continue to study the Antarctic Ice Sheet (AIS) and make projections about how much it could contribute to future sea level. My previous work on the AIS has looked thousands of years ahead, but with this project I’d like to focus on a much shorter time period: the next 100 to 200 years, which has more relevance to policies being made now.”

Nick says with the support from the Fellowship he’ll be able to develop international collaborations and contribute to a major international model inter-comparison project that is needed for the next report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, as well as take on two PhD students to assist him in the research.

“It’s really great to have Nancy and Rob at different stages of their Rutherford Fellowships too, because I can go to them for help and advice along the way,” says Nick. “We have a huge wealth of expertise here at the ARC—these people are world-leading scientists with decades of experience, but they are also fantastic people on a personal level.”

The three researchers are also part of a team that is using a Marsden Research Grant to examine how the Antarctic ice sheets and the surrounding Southern Ocean responded to rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations over the last 10,000 years.

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