Birte, please introduce yourself.
I’m Birte Gülk, a postdoc working at LOCEAN in Paris.
Tell us about your professional and academic career before becoming part of the OCEAN:ICE community.
My academic journey started with studying oceanography and geophysics in Hamburg and after deciding that the ocean is far more interesting than seismology and volcanoes, I did my masters in ocean and climate physics in Hamburg as well. From Hamburg I moved to Sweden, where I pursued my PhD. During my PhD, I worked and studied open-ocean polynyas in the Weddell Sea and spent a lot of time trying to understand why our ocean models have difficulties reproducing those.
Looking back to the first day of my undergrad, I honestly did not foresee moving across Europe and once living in Sweden and France.
What do you do within OCEAN:ICE?
Within OCEAN:ICE, I am part of work package 2 and 5. So far, the majority of my work has been in work package 5. Here, I am working on global ocean simulations and studying the response of the ocean circulation to the release of freshwater from the Antarctic Ice Sheet.
What have you enjoyed about OCEAN:ICE so far?
I joined OCEAN:ICE just before the last annual meeting, but I really enjoyed the meeting in Copenhagen. Besides this, I am happy to be part of the active early career group and their meetings.
Tell us about a skill or trait unique to you that you would like to share?
I am a swimmer with all my heart. If a meeting or workshop has a suitable place for swimming, like rivers or sea access, I am likely to be one of the first in the water and swimming some meters.
Stay tuned on our social media channels (X, Mastodon, LinkedIn and Bluesky) for more of the series of OCEAN:ICE 'Researcher in the Spotlight' articles.