Jamey Stutz

You received your Master’s in geology from Ohio State University with Dr. Terry Wilson. How did you initially get into the field of Antarctic research?

During that process, and being a super rock nerd, I learned so much about Antarctica’s history and geology and it just had a big impact on me.

Oh, yeah, I love that question. We have a huge NSF-funded Polar Rock Repository at Ohio State for all the rocks that come back from Antarctica. When I was an undergraduate student, there was an announcement, “Hey this student assistant job is up for offer,” so I went for it. I had no idea that Antarctica was a thing and that people do this kind of work, let alone its importance. Part of the curation process is looking up different places around Antarctica, getting the place names right, getting the metadata sorted. During that process, and being a super rock nerd, I learned so much about Antarctica’s history and geology and it just had a big impact on me. When it came time to do a Master’s after working there for a couple years during my undergrad, it was a pretty straightforward decision to continue Antarctic research. Through coursework and an internship, I developed a nice, working relationship with Terry Wilson and we cracked into figuring out a suitable project for me.

Great, can you tell me more about the focus of your thesis and work with POLENET?

My thesis work and Polar Earth Observing Network (POLENET) go together but are very separate. My Master’s project was making use of this incredible dataset that Terry and others had previously collected. They were on the Nathaniel B. Palmer research vessel, cruising around McMurdo Sound, and a little further out, mapping the seafloor, collecting seismic data and really high-resolution bathymetry. There was this incredible suite of landforms on the seafloor that tracked some of the glacial movements out there when the whole thing was plugged with grounded ice, plus a bunch of other really cool interactions like volcanoes and meltwater features. The goal of my Master’s thesis was characterizing the seafloor and then interpreting what happened with the ice flow and retreat. During my Master’s, I had this really unique opportunity to work with POLENET. One thing that makes Terry really special is that she is so keen to get all of her students out into the field. So, as a part of POLENET, we needed to move a lot of equipment around Antarctica, like GPS and seismic systems. The required logistical support represents a huge opportunity for students to get out into the field and help out. Since my Master’s research and POLENET are not directly related, I think that really highlights Terry’s keenness to get folks into the field.

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So, you went to Antarctica during austral summers throughout your Master’s to help with POLENET. Can you elaborate on that experience?

You get this sense of the place by going to Antarctica. I got a better understanding of where my data are coming from, even though I wasn’t going out to map the seafloor, by being on Ross Island, being able to look out over McMurdo Sound. Seeing some of these features that were previously just on the map to me made a huge impact. That first season, my first day on the ice was on Halloween, 2009. That season was really amazing, with POLENET really hitting its stride. We had a base at McMurdo where we flew out radially and installed GPS sensors, and then popped out to Byrd Station. At the time Byrd was a camp about 100 miles away from the west Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS) divide. The NSF established the station because our logistics were so intense. They thought, “Let’s give you a small camp that you can just do your own work out of.” I got to see a huge chunk of the continent and got to meet a lot of researchers working on a whole bunch of different projects. That was a really incredible time. And then to get to repeat that two additional seasons was really special.

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I have to ask a follow-up about Halloween. Did you have a costume?

This is really weird and not a normal costume, but I was the fun police. “Fun police” typically means not allowing fun, but if you think about the role of police, it’s to enforce the law. So, I was taking on the persona of the Fun Police trying to enforce fun. I wore this high-vis, brightly colored vest with reflectors on it, and I had these mini disco balls hanging from my sunnies, brightly colored neon everywhere, plus duct tape to put “Fun Police,” on the high-vis vest. That costume actually became part of my field attire. I would grab a high-vis wig from McMurdo costume store to keep nice and warm, and bring a little flair to the field as well.

That’s great, it sounds fun! Thanks for following up on that. It’s my understanding that your path in academia has been nonlinear. After your Master’s, you left academia to become an exploration scientist, before eventually returning as a PhD student in New Zealand. Can you talk about your experience outside of academia and what made you return for a PhD?

But ultimately, I was getting in trouble quite often at work by looking at Antarctica. Everyone would take a break and I would pull up Google Earth or read some of the latest literature, trying to see what the current state of research was.

I went to work for an oil company. I did two internships with Shell in Houston during my Master’s, which was a really great way to explore a different avenue. It ultimately led to a job at a Spanish oil and gas company, Repsol. I was a part of a team that was one of the top programs in the company. We were really well supported, had huge field campaigns. I found myself on the North Slope quite often and developed a lot of interesting skills from acquiring 3D seismic datasets and sitting on the well as a wellsite geologist. It afforded me this opportunity to really see the entire industry from an exploration point of view, and I learned so much. But ultimately, I was getting in trouble quite often at work by looking at Antarctica. Everyone would take a break and I would pull up Google Earth or read some of the latest literature, trying to see what the current state of research was. I even took holiday one time to go to an Antarctic drilling workshop with Terry. So, that Antarctic stuff was kind of always there. After about five years of working and living in the suburbs, my partner and I thought, “What are we doing? Let’s get out of here!”. My partner saw an advertisement for the PhD that I ultimately went for at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand and dived back in from there.

It was challenging to come back to academia and learn new skills in geochemistry and numerical modeling, but made easier by a solid support network by the good folks at The Antarctic Research Centre at Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University.

Did you find going back into academia challenging?

The transition was generally positive. Supervisors know you want to be in academia when you come back with more life experience and leave a higher paying job. Industry also helped set me up for success beyond the PhD. I work efficiently in a team setting and have enjoy building a team for new projects. My skills in developing professional relationships from the corporate environment really translated well to academia. It was challenging to come back to academia and learn new skills in geochemistry and numerical modeling, but made easier by a solid support network by the good folks at The Antarctic Research Centre at Te Herenga Waka - Victoria University.

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You've been an active member in SCAR, both during your Master's and doctoral work. It's my understanding that you co-led a community workshop on understanding the Last Glacial Maximum in the Terra Nova Bay region. What was your motivation behind facilitating this workshop and what were the outcomes?

I think the motivation for me started out maybe a little selfish: I really like being around other people and I know I don't have all the answers, but that friends and collaborators might.

I think the motivation for me started out maybe a little selfish: I really like being around other people and I know I don't have all the answers, but that friends and collaborators might. I just dreamed that we had overlapping objectives and tried to facilitate working as a group. The workshop was well attended and we had a big international buy-in. Along with sharing and publishing data, I think a lasting result that came out of it was a gaggle of great new friends, which I'm always happy to have.

After the 2018 SCAR Open Science Conference in Switzerland, I formed great working relationships with researchers at the University of Pisa and with the Korean Polar Institute, which ultimately led to two Masters projects, helped train two researchers in the lab and . These collaborations continue today as multiple projects are coming to a close. We look forward to sharing what we learned.

Your PhD work involved comparing geological data to ice sheet modeling results, specifically focusing on the dynamic thinning and grounding line retreat of David Glacier. Can you speak a little bit more about that project and its main conclusions?

A lot of the motivation for this work stemmed from frustration out of my Master’s project. We have few age constraints from McMurdo Sound, so we have no way to determine when particular events happened. For my PhD, I knew that I wanted a project that would give me some age control over some particular event. Lucky for me, Andrew Mackintosh (Monash University, Australia) and Kevin Norton (Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand) were fantastic supervisors and taught me a lot. What our research group was trying to do at David Glacier was constrain the thinning history from the last glacial maximum to present. We use cosmogenic nuclides in rocks that stick up through the ice to understand when those rocks were dropped off by a glacier. If you collect data all along the glacier, you've got a better footprint of constraint. We identified a two-thousand-year period, from about 7.5 thousand to 5.5 thousand years ago, where the David Glacier thinned pretty dramatically (Stutz et al. 2021).

It’s great that we know when this happened, but I think it's also nice to say why this happened, and that's where the modeling came in. Supported by the Antarctic Bursary, I worked with Stuart Jamieson at Durham University in the UK, along with Mike Bentley and Pippa Whitehouse. They were really supportive of me to come there for about a month and learn the nuts and bolts of the model that they were using. We found that increasing ocean temperature and reducing the softness of the ice around the edges of the ice stream causes the glacier to retreat. Our model simulated thinning rates really close to what we calculated from the cosmogenic nuclide data and demonstrated the ocean’s role in driving thinning and retreat.

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What work have you been up to since your PhD?

After my PhD, I completed about three years of postdoctoral work continuing research on cosmogenic dating and Antarctica. That was a crazy few years in the lab and we generated a bunch of cool data. Some of that time is captured in a new paper from the upper Byrd Glacier (Stutz et al. 2023)  as well as some fun entries to the field blog. 

When I moved back to the States in 2023, I assumed the role of Assistant Director at the Polar Rock Repository at Ohio State. I was really excited to complete a few new projects there. Part of the role of the Rock Repository is to expand knowledge of Antarctic geology, and we found some really cool collections at Ohio State, just not in the PRR. This special collection, essentially hidden in the Herbarium Museum of Biological Diversity, were Antarctic lichens collected by a legendary biologist, Emmanuel Rudolph in the 1960s. His story is too long for this interview but suffice to say, his collection was an amazing, rich dataset that we were excited about. Samples in the PRR also have lichens on them and had never been classified. In order to increase use of our collection and make the Herbarium’s collection more accessible, we brought in world-renowned Spanish polar biologist, Leo Sancho. Leo helped us identify all these lichens on our rocks, which expanded the utility of the rock repository to the biological community. We always just considered that geologists would use it, so that project was really fun.

Another amazing project was retrieval of a large sample collection from John Goodge at University of Minnesota-Duluth. John’s field experience, attention to detail and keen support for the PRR made this retrieval extra special. I had the pleasure of rummaging through the basement to help load up for shipment to Columbus. This was a sizable collection and rocks are heavy so the project was fun. A lot of his samples were glacial deposits from the backside of the Transantarctic Mountains, so I was thoroughly delighted to work on them.

Ultimately, family and personnel issues at the PRR led to my resignation. I’ll always be very grateful for that period of time and proud of our work.

More recently a job opportunity at the Ohio Geological Survey popped up, and it was really interesting for me. I had never really considered a career at the Geological Survey. That seems a bit silly, they're right here in town next to Ohio State, where I've spent ten years doing geology work! The job description read like it was written for me.

A lot of my interests in earth science stem from my early days of geology work here, living in the Midwest, growing up in Michigan. My first few geology courses were here in Ohio, and I remember being awestruck by glacial deposits and their stories. We're in Ohio - it is crazy to think about how there were ice sheets here. It doesn't make any sense unless you're in Alaska or a place where there's at least a glacier around. The question brought me full circle and I knew I was in the right place.

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So how long have you been working at the Ohio Geological Survey? Can you tell me about what you've been up to there?

I've been working at the Ohio Geological Survey for about nine months now, and it's been wonderful. It's a total transformation - there's so much for me to learn, the people are amazing, and it's a really steady job that's balanced with field, lab, and office work, which is pretty hard to achieve just about anywhere.

I've just started a project mapping the surficial deposits of Northwest Ohio. Typically we work county by county, updating maps that in some cases are sixty to eighty years old. The county we are starting now, no one has completely mapped from the surface. We also map the bedrock topography. Two-thirds of Ohio is covered by glacial till, up to 500 feet thick in some places, so there's an intricate past landscape below all these glacial deposits. We utilize a rich public water well database and shallow geophysical methods to make maps and cross sections. Ultimately, our work supports development projects and ensures proper use of our natural resources. We're supporting a sewer extension project with some of our mapping tools. It's very rewarding - taking that knowledge of glacial systems and glacial geology into a world where it's helping people with their water issues. Service is a major part of the job and doing that while looking at rocks is A-ok with me. 

In making this transition to a new job, have you found anything difficult, and in what ways do you think your past work has really helped?

That's an awesome question, because the Survey sits squarely between industry, government, and academia. We have a few people getting PhDs at the moment, supported through the Survey, and we're working with private companies as well as the city on the sewer extension project. It's so interesting to me to be able to understand that background that I have - working in the oil industry, working in Antarctica, working in academia, even growing up working in the service industry for my parents' tourist business in Northern Michigan. I feel like it's really prepared me well for this kind of middle ground that I find myself in. I'm not afraid to talk to new folks, so we can get some fun things done.

What about your continued involvement with SCAR throughout the last few years?

That’s a tricky one now that I’m working for the Ohio Geological Survey. But in my free time, I’m very excited to work on a few papers from the PhD/Postdoc time and I’m having fun helping others with their manuscripts, sometimes even reviewing journal articles. But it’ll be hard to completely remove Antarctica from my brain. 

The weekend before starting at the Geological Survey, I went down to the WAIS (West Antarctic Ice Sheet) workshop and presented, and gave a little mic drop. I presented a pretty fun study where I used a bunch of rocks that were in the basements in New Zealand. It's like my COVID project kind of thing, and it's really impactful for a few researchers working in the Eastern Ross Sea. At the end, I just put a video of my partner throwing my dog a frisbee, and I was like, "So I'll be working for the survey from here on out, and I'll be hanging out with these two." It was kind of my informal goodbye.

Just before that, I also went to a GIA workshop over in DC on isostatic adjustment that Terry was going to. Those were kind of legacy things that I was involved in that I wanted to pass on. I've handed a couple of projects over to other researchers to keep maturing, helping where I can. I've got a few potential projects for interested PIs and students. I’m very excited to see a Master’s student complete her thesis from our most recent field work at Mt. Tuatara along the Byrd Glacier. So I'm kind of carrying on by researching Antarctica with others, even if a bit vicariously.

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I’ll close with the last question that I end up asking everyone, and that’s what advice would you give to early career scientists wanting to get involved in Antarctic research.

So find your team. We definitely need more people involved in Antarctic research, and understanding the team and the type of folks who support you is a strong skill.

I’ve thought about this a lot. I think, for me, it's like “do it!” or maybe “accept the risk”. My partner and I have both had a nonlinear career, and that doesn't have to be a bad thing.We've had a lot of rewarding adventures getting to meet new people across the world in pursuit of understanding our world. That's been really fun. So find your team. We definitely need more people involved in Antarctic research, and understanding the team and the type of folks who support you is a strong skill. A kind of a silly, but worthwhile piece of advice is to come up with some acronym and branding for your project. For example, my project along the David Glacier was called Project Dog Treat (David Outlet Glacier Thinning and retREAT), and we made a nice sticker for it, and then everybody's talking about Dog Treat. I've made a lot of friends by handing out stickers and it’s a bit of fun. Plus, it’s an opportunity to collaborate with people not otherwise involved in Antarctic research. I’ve asked graphic designers to design logos that they've been able to put into their portfolios. Ultimately, I encourage people to just get involved, identify supportive teams, and to find your own way to get people interested in your work.

I think there’s a lot of good advice in there. I need to start thinking of some acronyms for my current research!