Dr. Runa Antony from the National Centre for Polar and Ocean Research, India has recently joined the “Interface Geochemistry" section 3.5 as a Humboldt Research Fellow. The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation awards Fellowships to scientists from abroad with above-average qualifications.

Postdoctoral researchers are supported at the beginning of their academic career with a monthly fellowship amount of 2,670 euros for a research stay of 6-24 months at a German research institution.

Over the next two years, Dr. Antony together with other members and collaborators of Liane G. Benning’s team will be working on an extremely timely topic: the storage, dynamics and fate of organic carbon on the surface of the Greenland Ice Sheet. Light absorbing organic matter, together with mineral dust and pigmented microbes, massively reduce the snow and ice surface albedo (amount of solar energy reflected from the ice surface). This leads to increased solar radiation absorption, resulting in accelerated melting of the ice sheet surface.

Dr. Antony aims to derive a quantitative and qualitative understanding of the nature, sources, on-ice microbial processing and fluxes of organic matter on the ever-changing ice surface during melting. This way she hopes to provide novel, holistic insights on the interplay between microbial metabolism, carbon cycling and surface melting and help fine tune the response of Greenland’s ice masses to future climate warming scenarios in global predictive models.