Rachael, please introduce yourself.
My name is Rachael Sanders, I’m a Postdoc working at the British Antarctic Survey.
Tell us about your professional and academic career before becoming part of the OCEAN:ICE community.
For my undergraduate degree, I studied math's with oceans and climate science at the University of Liverpool, with a year also working at the National Oceanography Centre in Liverpool. After that, I moved to Cambridge to do a PhD with BAS and the University of Southampton, where I explored interannual variability in Southern Ocean water masses, and particularly the impact of sea ice changes on Subantarctic Mode Water. Since then, I have completed two short postdocs; the first at BAS, where I investigated the causes of the 2015 North Atlantic cold anomaly within different ocean models. The second was at NORCE in Bergen, where I was developing a method to quantify different processes driving deoxygenation using observations from the North Atlantic.
What do you do within OCEAN:ICE?
I’m a physical oceanographer in Work Package 5. My role involves retrieving and analysing mooring data from the South Sandwich Trench, to investigate bottom water export in the region. I'm also using oxygen isotope measurements from the Weddell Sea to determine changes in sources of freshwater.
What have you enjoyed about OCEAN:ICE so far?
I’ve only recently started working in OCEAN:ICE, but I really enjoyed meeting everyone at the annual project meeting in Copenhagen earlier this year.
Tell us about a skill or trait unique to you that you would like to share?
I’m not sure I have any particularly unique skills, but after asking around for ideas, I’ve been told that I keep morale high... although this is probably just because I organise weekly cake at work, forcing everyone to socialise.
Stay tuned on our social media channels (X, Mastodon, LinkedIn and Facebook) for more of the series of OCEAN:ICE 'Researcher in the Spotlight' articles.