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For the past three years, PhD student Brooke Chase has spent her working hours mastering the ice core analysis techniques developed at INSTAAR’s��Stable Isotope Lab. She has processed thousands of feet of ice in pursuit of a deeper understanding of ancient climate shifts.

But now, for the first time in her life, Chase is encountering a glacier in the wild. Thanks to the��Sarah Crump Graduate Fellowship, she is spending the entire month of June at the in Southeast Alaska.��

“This fellowship gives me something I haven’t had access to before as an ice core scientist: being on a glacier,” Chase said. “Until now, my research has lived entirely in the lab with an ice core drilled thousands of miles away. I feel so grateful to have this opportunity.”

Brooke Chase looks at a readout of isotopic ratios from an ice core as Bradley Markle (left) and Tyler Jones (right) look on. (Gabe Allen)

Chase’s PhD work is focused on��a high-precision analysis of a mile-long ice core extracted from the Greenland Ice Sheet Project in the early 1990s. With guidance from her advisor, Tyler Jones, she is examining the relationship between local climate variability in Greenland and historic abrupt global temperature changes. All this work is focused on climate signals preserved in ice from tens of thousands of years ago.��

This summer, she is taking a break from analysis to collect samples of recently-formed ice and snow. This work will give her a better understanding of the chemical and physical traces left in ancient ice.

“These efforts complement her laboratory-based ice core analysis and strengthen the connection between modern surface processes and interpretations of past polar climate variability,” Jones wrote in a recommendation for the fellowship.

The Sarah Crump Graduate Fellowship was created by Crump and her family shortly before her untimely passing. Like Chase, Crump was a paleoclimate scientist. The fellowship seeks to empower students studying high-altitude or high-latitude environments, with a special focus on students from underserved communities.

Chase was selected for her excellence as an early-career scientist as well as the exceptional challenges she has faced in academia. She is the first member of her family to attend college.

“As a first-generation college student with limited academic and financial support, I often struggled with impostor syndrome,” Chase wrote in her application. “Over time, I have come to recognize the resilience and perspective these experiences fostered.”

Her advisor echoes that sentiment.

“I have grown confident that Brooke will be one of those special people in the scientific community who will inspire others for years, decades, and a lifetime to come,” Jones said.