Impacts of the Larsen Ice Shelf System on the Weddell Sea

Because she excelled in her math and science courses, everyone pushed Amber Lancaster towards pursuing a degree in Electrical Engineering at the University of Southern California. Although she really enjoyed making robots, she decided to spend the next few years teaching English as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Morocco. Upon her return to the United States, she knew she wanted to continue teaching, but she switched to teaching science, her true passion. She received her Master’s in Education from the University of California– Berkeley in 2009 and has been teaching high school Biology at the June Jordan School for Equity in San Francisco, California ever since.

Dr. Maria Vernet is a Senior Research Biologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, one of the foremost oceanographic institutions in the world. Oceanography is an international arena and as such, Dr. Vernet has conducted research in international settings since 1987 when she first traveled to the Arctic and in 1988 to Antarctica. She participated in one of the first research teams to study the effect of ultraviolet radiation on marine phytoplankton after the discovery of the Antarctic ozone hole in 1985. Since then she has participated in a variety of multi- and interdisciplinary research projects, both national and international. Her field expeditions have taken her into the Atlantic, Pacific, Arctic and Southern Oceans with a variety of internationally assembled research teams. She presently participates in two Antarctic research projects studying the effects of global change in Antarctica, one on free-floating icebergs that have increased in abundance in the last decade and a second on the ecosystems of the Larsen B Ice Shelf on which she will host Amber Lancaster as a PolarTREC teacher. You can read more about Dr. Vernet and her research here [http://polarphytoplankton.ucsd.edu] and about the LARISSA project here [http://www.hamilton.edu/expeditions/Larissa]