Emily Chen, 2017, Geosciences

Emily Chen ’17

In contrast to the Arctic sea ice, which has been decreasing, the Antarctic sea ice has been growing at a small but significant rate in the past decades. My PEI summer internship aimed to understand the mechanisms that are driving the sea ice growth around Antarctica. To analyze the trend and test possible contributors, I worked with several different climate models, primary from the Geophysical Fluid Dynamic Laboratory, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) lab in Princeton, NJ. My analysis determined that the primary driving mechanisms of the Antarctic sea ice trend were natural variability and indicated convection—the transport of cold water down and the transport of warmer water to the surface. From this internship, I not only learned how to code in Python (a programming language), but I also gained a general understanding of the climate, oceans, and atmosphere through the many seminars, journal club meetings, and weekly read-throughs of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports. This experience has shaped my future academic study, as I plan to major in geological engineering, which is sponsored by both the Civil and Environmental Engineering and the Geosciences departments.