Britney Schmidt grew up in southern Arizona, but she now seeks out decidedly chillier climes. She frequents such places as Antarctica, Greenland, and Canada’s Northwest Territories to learn about the icy worlds of our outer solar system. Her work is an amalgam of engineering, planetary science, astrobiology, robotics, and polar oceanography.
“I like to focus on everything,” Schmidt said. “That multidisciplinary approach is, to me, really exciting.”
“I had my mind blown.”
Schmidt became a scientist almost by accident. “Nobody in my family is a scientist or an academic,” she said. In college, Schmidt was having trouble deciding on a major and on a whim took an introductory astronomy class. It captivated her, and she remembered being astounded when she learned that some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn contain oceans hidden under thick layers of ice. “I had my mind blown,” she said.
Today Schmidt is an Earth and planetary scientist at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. She’s still fascinated by ice-covered oceans, and she builds instruments such as submersibles that she and her team use in polar regions. It’s exciting to think that similar technology might one day be used to explore a distant world like Jupiter’s moon Europa, she said.
There are closer-to-home motivations for her work, too, Schmidt said. The effects of climate change in polar regions are acute, and she and her colleagues are working to better understand some of those fragile landscapes before they disappear. “Being in these places that are so powerful and so delicate is really overwhelming,” she said.
—Katherine Kornei (@KatherineKornei), Science Writer
This profile is part of a special series in our August 2024 issue on science careers.
Citation: Kornei, K. (2024), Britney Schmidt: Following the ice, Eos, 105, https://doi.org/10.1029/2024EO240329. Published on 25 July 2024.
Text © 2024. The authors. CC BY-NC-ND 3.0Except where otherwise noted, images are subject to copyright. Any reuse without express permission from the copyright owner is prohibited.
Related