Terry Wilson

Much of your work focuses on the interaction of solid earth and ice sheets in Antarctica. How did you get involved in Antarctic research, and structural geology in particular?

My circuitous pathway to exploring the geology of Antarctica for most of my career began in Detroit, specifically the suburbs of Detroit. Growing up I had no experience whatsoever as to what true wilderness was. Early on in my undergraduate years at the University of Michigan, a random academic advisor signed me up for a geology class when I was a freshman and I discovered plate tectonics, which was the coolest thing that I ever encountered. He also pointed me to geology field trips. I started going on these field trips out west and got an inkling of what wilderness was. Within a year or two I switched to a geology major. It turned out that the culture of geology resonated with me.

When I went to graduate school at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. Fortunately for me, there was a mentor and friend from my undergraduate program who was on sabbatical at Columbia who knew me better than I knew myself at that point. He said I should talk to Ian Dalziel about structural geology and that would really suit me. So, I did, and he would later become my PhD advisor. Luckily for me, at the moment I was knocking on Ian Dalziel’s door he had a woman graduate student, Margie Winslow, who was about to go out in the field and needed a field assistant. So, I was in the right place at the right time.

...there is a whole mountain range, the Transantarctic Mountains, that goes deep into the interior of the continent, and it had not been studied by modern structural geology techniques.

As far as applying my interests to Antarctica, Ian had done a lot of Antarctic research, but I had not been involved in that. I did my PhD in the Andes. It wasn’t until I got a permanent position at Ohio State University that I began to focus on the Antarctic. Ohio State had the Institute of Polar Studies which became the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center. There were a lot of people in the Geology Department at that time who were working in Antarctica, and I listened to what they were doing. That was really what sparked my interest in Antarctic research.

In particular, I learned that there is a whole mountain range, the Transantarctic Mountains, that goes deep into the interior of the continent, and it had not been studied by modern structural geology techniques. Researching how those mountains formed really piqued my interest. It’s kind of an unusual setting; most mountains form on the edges of tectonic plates, but this range is in the interior of a plate, and so I wrote a proposal to work on that. It took me a couple of times to get it funded, of course, as it usually does. That is how I started in Antarctic research in 1989.

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So, 1989 was your first Antarctic expedition? What exactly were you studying and what were your initial impressions?

Yes, I first went in the 1989-90 field season. That was my first NSF-funded project and I was the principal investigator (PI). The goal was to study the structure of faults along the margins of the Transantarctic Mountains to try and reconstruct the relative motion at the time that the mountains were lifting up, and how those faults accommodated the motions that were associated with the formation of the mountains. It’s pretty traditional fieldwork, going from outcrop to outcrop looking for fault structures, measuring them, etc.

What was my impression? Well, those were very different days. The military still ran the logistics at McMurdo Station. They flew the planes, they flew the helicopters, they ran the galley and the bars, and everything else. So, it was a very different world. Of course, we've always been there to support science, but science did not seem like the central function of McMurdo in those days. 

The first thing I did in Antarctica – and this is mind-blowing to me still to this day – was drive a loaded snowmobile with a Nansen sled across the sea ice to Granite Harbor, which is about 75 km to the north. I had never ridden on a snowmobile in my life! There was no training. I just hopped on and started down on the snow, pulling the sled, and thought, “What the heck am I doing!?” 

That field season was two months long, and I rode a total of 400 km or so. I rode my snowmobile all over the place, camping with the other two people on my field team – one was a mountaineer, and one was a student. It was quite a hard-core introduction to Antarctica. Since then, I've been down to the Antarctic 24 more times, and have cumulatively spent over 4 years of my life in Antarctica. It's been pretty diverse in terms of the science I’ve participated in.

Antarctic research has been historically a male-dominated field. Have you had much push back as a PI in your position of power, and has your experience as a female scientist changed throughout your career? 

...up until about 12 or 15 years ago, my whole career experience was being the only woman amongst men.

In all of the time I have gone to Antarctica, I have always been the PI of my project, unlike many young people who are not in that “power position”. There are a lot of difficulties and barriers to succeed in Antarctic science, but I didn't feel as a PI that the challenges were related to me being a woman. It was rather various elements of the system. My experience as a female scientist has changed, but not nearly enough, in my opinion, as much as you would imagine it could have or should have. When I started working in Antarctica, and up until about 12 or 15 years ago, my whole career experience was being the only woman amongst men. When I started grad school there were about 125 graduate students, and I could count the number of female grad students on two hands. When I got a faculty job, I was the only woman on the faculty. So that was my normal mode of operation, being in a totally male-dominated field. There were a lot of issues related to that, but I had a lot of mentorship about specifically Antarctic research that was helpful to me from the other faculty members at Ohio State. Now we have a handful of women out of 30 instead of only one out of 30. So that's better but nowhere near where you might want to see it. And in terms of PIs in the Antarctic program, there are plenty more women PIs in the mix, and all of that is great.

Another change that I have seen, and I'd characterize it the exact same way – not enough and not fast enough – is in relation to SCAR. I first became involved in a leadership role in SCAR in the Scientific Research Programs (SRPs) in the late 1990s. I was asked to lead one of their SRPs. It was predominantly men. When I became the US alternate delegate to SCAR, at a meeting where Delegates and alternate delegates sat around a giant table, there must have been close to 80 people there, and only two were women – me and the alternate delegate from Argentina. That’s it! And of course that has changed. Now you look around the room, and it's not nearly 100% men. There are plenty of women serving as leaders and delegates or alternate delegates and in various roles in the science programs. That change has been tremendous over time, fortunately.

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Well, that's good to hear. We’ll discuss your experiences with SCAR a bit later on, but first I want to delve into your role with the Polar Earth Observing Network (POLENET). Starting off, how did the idea of the project initially come about? 

It's an interesting origin story that also relates to SCAR. In the late 1990s, the Geoscience Group within SCAR was, without me, having discussions about the future of geoscience research in Antarctica. They decided that a nice multi-disciplinary theme would be Antarctic neotectonics, which basically is an activity in terms of structural deformation of the continent, volcanism, earthquakes, uplift, or subsidence that you might measure with GPS. Essentially all of those areas of geomorphology that show in the changing landscape. The SCAR Geosciences Group asked me if I would lead a program looking into Antarctic neotectonics, so I did.

The program started in 1998, and it was called ANTec, which stood for Antarctic neo-tectonics. Like most SCAR things, we had preliminary meetings and a big workshop that I organized for the program in 2001. It was very multi-disciplinary and involved a lot of discussion about how to integrate different lines of evidence of how the Antarctic rock surface was changing with time. One big group of people was interested in making measurements of earthquakes by using GPS and actually collecting data that would measure how much action, in the tectonic sense, was going on. From that meeting, we put together a little report about objectives, but we also had established a community of people that were interested in doing this. At that time measurements were made at permanent research stations where there was power, and there were a small number of deep field experiments where people tried to set up autonomous instruments to operate. But they would basically measure for the summer only. And that was it. We really didn't have any measurements in the interior of the continent.

...SCAR can generate the kind of collaborative framework that allows us to make measurements across a large part of the Antarctic continent simultaneously by using resources from different countries and collaborating at a scale to collect the first data across the interior of Antarctica.

Coincidentally, with this interest building momentum and science objectives being established, a group in the US, which included me and several other people, eventually became the co-PIs of the US part of the POLENET project. This group included a very good colleague of mine, Ian Willans at Ohio State, who unfortunately passed on. He was a pioneer in using GPS for glaciology, measuring how fast the ice was moving and differential motion in the ice, and modeling those movements. We teamed with Larry Hothem at the US Geological Survey, who is a technical expert in high precision GPS, and partnered with the NSF-funded facilities, UNAVCO and Iris Pascal. We got, from NSF, a Major Research Instrumentation Award to develop power and communication systems so that the GPS instruments could run year-round. When the 4th International Polar Year (IPY, 2007-2008) gained momentum, and NSF and other countries announced special funding for IPY research, the requirement was international collaboration on projects. And so, we were perfectly poised to do this because we just had these big meetings and established our international partnerships and objectives. And we were just developing the technology that was required to do this work.

So, we put this research in as an IPY project. IPY had an umbrella of named projects and POLENET was one of them. This research started in both polar regions; there were new networks and measurements made across Antarctica, Greenland, and various other parts of the Arctic (including Lapland and Arctic Canada). There were a ton of different projects from different countries or partnerships that collected data under the umbrella POLENET for IPY. My collaborators and I got a specific project funded by the NSF for the US component of IPY, which we also, confusingly, called POLENET. POLENET is really the umbrella of the major international collaborative project, and then it also became the name for our US-based network that we developed at that time. It's a nice story of the way SCAR can generate the kind of collaborative framework that allows us to make measurements across a large part of the Antarctic continent simultaneously by using resources from different countries and collaborating at a scale to collect the first data across the interior of Antarctica.

That’s an astonishing feat. So, this might be a hard question because the project's been going on for so long, but if you had to highlight one or two significant findings from your research through POLENET, what would that be? 

Our measurements are super high! And these measurements transformed our thinking about the rates at which rebound and glacial isostatic adjustment can occur.

That is a tough question. And there are a lot of good answers to that question. I think I'd like to highlight what led us to focus on the theme of solid earth-ice sheet interactions because our initial results were the stimulus for thinking about that. In particular, the seismology part of the project mapped the structure of the deep earth by measuring wave speed. Wave speed is directly related to how warm or cold the deep earth is, and that in turn is directly related to whether that section of earth is strong or weak. If the deep earth is warm, it will be weak, and its interior motion will be relatively fast. If it is cold and rigid, it is strong and will move slowly. From the seismic mapping, we discovered not only was West Antarctica a relatively weak part of the continent compared to East Antarctica, but it was surprisingly weak. There were really low numbers for the viscosity in the mantle, which is the value that says how fast solid-state flow occurs down in the mantle, which is part of isostatic rebound. That's why the surface of the earth is deforming, because of flow in the mantle. Meanwhile, on the GPS side, we measured really startling rates of crustal deformation. We measured uplift rates of over 5 cm a year in West Antarctica, near the Amundsen embayment. That sounds like such a tiny number, but actually, elsewhere in the world where glacial isostatic adjustment is still going on in the Northern Hemisphere, the maximum is a centimeter a year. Our measurements are super high! And these measurements transformed our thinking about the rates at which rebound and glacial isostatic adjustment can occur.

The view about solid earth-ice sheet interactions before our project made these measurements was that the mantle changed slowly on a thousand-year timescale. And indeed, the Northern Hemisphere is still rebounding from the last glacial maximum 10-15,000 years ago. Therefore, isostatic rebound really had no influence on the ice sheet and was not relevant to any questions about the future of the ice sheet or sea level. Right? It was irrelevant. But when people started modeling things moving at the rate that we measured, and with the weak earth that the seismology documented, they realized, well, that isn't the case at all. The latest modeling results using the data collected by our project show that, in fact, the change in the vertical land motion associated with rebound influences the ice sheet dynamics and how it behaves. Isostatic rebound at these higher rates can actually either slow down ice-sheet retreat or in some scenarios even cause re-advance of the ice sheet, which means that it's a potential mitigating factor relative to Antarctic ice sheet contribution to sea level change in certain scenarios. So that has completely transformed the view that we have of both the process of rebound and the rates at which rebound occurs, but also this question of “Is the ice sheet influenced by the solid earth below or not?” And definitely, the view has swung to yes, it matters. There's a lot of current work going on to try to quantify how much these uplift rates matter, and under what scenarios of climate forcing. How much will this relatively rapid rebound influence the behavior of the ice sheet in the future? So neotectonics in Antarctica has really grown into a whole new field based on being able to obtain those measurements across the continent.

I remember reading about these uplift rates in one of my fluid dynamics classes, and that was very surprising to me as well. Transitioning back to your work with SCAR. Initially you were an alternate delegate, and then the US delegate to SCAR and a Vice President for SCAR at the international level. When did you first become associated with SCAR, and how has your engagement facilitated international collaboration? 

My first association with SCAR was related to the International Symposium on Antarctic Earth Sciences (ISAES), which is a SCAR geoscience conference held every four years, like the SCAR Biology Symposium. In the early nineties, when I had my very first results from my Antarctic work, I was going to ISAES. These are still the best meetings ever for every geoscientist working in Antarctica because they bring together everybody from around the world who is working on overlapping and related problems into the same space. So that's how I first got associated with SCAR. I remain associated with those meetings, although they've been on pause until 2025. It’s something that we all miss in the community, that’s for sure.

As I mentioned earlier, I was also involved with ANTec, the Antarctic neo-tectonics specialists’ group in SCAR. They weren't called Scientific Research Programs then; they’ve gone through some evolution of names. I participated in ANTec, which led to POLENET. As POLENET was progressing, we were starting to think about this solid earth-ice sheet coupling and what that might mean. That led to the next Scientific Research Program that I founded and initially led. It was called SERCE, which stands for Solid Earth Response and influence on Cryospheric Evolution. It was set up explicitly to try to look at how the changing solid earth below influences the ice sheet above, and vice versa. It was still just a very nascent idea. Everyone knew that the ice sheet influenced the solid earth through rebound, and that was everybody's established view. But no one really thought that solid earth could influence the ice sheet. When we got reviews of the proposal for the research program, one of the reviewers said, “Well, you need to change the name because there is no influence of the solid earth on the ice sheet.” We said, “Well, no, that's really what this whole program is meant to explore.” I led SERCE for four years, and then Pippa Whitehouse and Matt King took over for the last four years of the project. Through that period, we established the idea that yes, indeed, there were these influences of the solid earth on the ice sheet. So that was a super satisfying span of time to see the science develop through the workshops and collaborative work that we did through that SCAR program.

Another thing that we have done is POLENET. Obviously, POLENET was a very international and interdisciplinary project, which is one of the strengths of programs that get developed through SCAR. Something we found early in the program is that there weren't enough people trained in using these data streams to model glacial isostatic adjustment. There were very few people in the US doing that kind of work and a smattering of people in Canada and in Europe, but we just didn't have enough people. And so, we developed – and it was sponsored by SCAR’s SERCE program together with our US POLENET NSF award – these international training schools. Every four years, we've had a training school on glacial isostatic adjustment. We have the funds to fully support people, students, early career scientists, and PhD students to participate in these schools and give them hands-on experience with all the data streams and the actual computer modeling codes that produce these results. We bring a lot of instructors who are experts in the field together with these students and we spend a week together. Everyone makes new connections that they can build on and rely on for mentorship as they go forward in the field. That kind of internationally oriented, interdisciplinary school, I think, has been a successful model for creating the next generation of polar researchers. Some of the participants work in Greenland or in Scandinavia, some in the Antarctic. The program is not entirely Antarctic-centric. Through the umbrella of SCAR, we've been able to have enough scope and bring people on board from countries that have very small Antarctic programs but could still access the data and do modeling studies if they had the skills. So, I think that's been an important element of my participation through SCAR and doing those training schools.

It is great that you have provided such a training opportunity for early career researchers. In that vein, what advice would you give early career scientists wanting to get involved in Antarctic research? 

Don’t hold back because you think you can’t do it. You can figure it out; we all do.

Go for it! Use your advisors and mentors, those are the people that will help you find opportunities. Don’t hold back because you think you can’t do it. You can figure it out; we all do. Don’t let things you can’t control push you off your track. In my case that was breast cancer. It wasn’t just the health part of it; I got over it years ago. However, a big problem for me was getting through the physical qualification process for USAP. I was NPQ’d (not physically qualified for deployment). I pushed back super hard against the system to get beyond that and that was tough. You don’t let it stop you. You may not change the system yourself, but you can change your attitude. Keep learning. Find people you like to work with that will keep you going and motivated and have fun in the hard work and accomplishments you’ll have.

I also think for anybody, certainly for a young US scientist, you really have to scan the horizon for really fundamental questions that can only be addressed in Antarctica, because that's what gets funded. How do you do that? The way you do that is, you go to community meetings like WAIS (West Antarctic Ice Sheet), or you go to AGU (American Geophysical Union) sessions that are Antarctic-centric and you see what topics people are discussing. Take advantage of those venues to connect with actual people and try out some ideas with them. It’s a very supportive community, but as a young researcher, you have to take some of those steps yourself to get involved in these efforts that are already underway. The SCAR International Symposium on Antarctic Earth Sciences is a great example. There you can build international collaborations. Join the SCAR groups. So, there’s the SCAR Geosciences Group, but there's a zillion Action and Expert Groups underneath that umbrella. I think there's a false impression that you need to be invited or there's special access to those groups, and it's not. You simply indicate your interest and join the Listserv and you're in! That's another opportunity to participate. The training school that I described about glacial isostatic adjustment, there's a lot of those now. It's become an increasingly popular mode of training in interdisciplinary topics, and those are a great way to meet experts in the field and meet other people at your level who are potential collaborators.

I guess, finally, in a more organized way, now in the US we have US-SCAR, which is providing opportunities. We have the Polar Science Early Career Community Office (PSECCO), which is providing opportunities. We have the US and international branches of the Association of Polar Early Career Scientists (APECS) that are providing opportunities. And I would say step up to those organizations and become involved in them. Don't wait for an email to randomly come but really try to participate. And I think all of that pays off a lot when you want to do polar research.