Ellen Mosley-Thompson quotes poets and has a bucket list that has long been ignored.
Soon, she will face the deep, profound silence of a remote field camp on an ice sheet in Antarctica. It is a place that, when others are sleeping and she is awake, has a silence so absolute she can hear the beating of her own heart. There will be more day than night.
Temperatures can drop to below zero. A twin otter plane stands by in case of an emergency, and researchers will stay warm by hard work and layers of clothes.
Mosley-Thompson, 61, is an Ohio State polar scientist and director of the Byrd Polar Research Center at OSU. She will conduct an expedition to the Bruce Plateau in Antarctica in December. She will spend 45 days at the camp doing research, which she says will be a welcome respite from her growing administrative duties at OSU.
She and five other researchers will collect ice cores to bring back to OSU for further study.
The work will be tiring. Often, toward the end of such an expedition, researchers don’t even want to eat.
“You really just want to finish your work and crawl into your sleeping bag, you’re so exhausted, but you can’t do that; you have to eat,” Mosley-Thompson said.
Mosley-Thompson is an expert at connecting ice-core research to climate change. So far this year, she has received four prestigious awards, including an election to the National Academy of Science. She is also a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union.
Mosley-Thompson has many titles and many roles to fulfill. Besides her responsibilities as director and research scientist, she is a wife, author, mother of a 31-year-old daughter, professor and a fan of The Best Damn Band in The Land — just for starters.
“Who I really am is, you know, a research scientist and a professor, and I was that 20 years ago and I’ll be that in 10 years after somebody else is the director,” she said. “For me, that’s my identity, as a researcher, and a teacher.”
She took over as director of the Byrd Polar Research Center Oct. 1.
“I think it’s been fun,” she said of the past two weeks, but it has been challenging.
It’s helped that she knows the culture and people of OSU. She describes a learning curve that is steep, “but not as steep as if I had just come from the outside.”
Mosley-Thompson is part of another important team. Her husband, Lonnie Thompson, is an OSU Distinguished University professor in the Department of Geological Sciences and is also a renowned scientist.
In 2008, she and her husband were jointly awarded a Dan David prize worth $1 million for their efforts in ice core research.
“I would say that our whole life structure has been teamwork,” Lonnie Thompson said. “She’s a very confident individual and I think we make a good team.”
Since meeting at a geologist’s party at Marshall University, they have conducted research that compliments the other’s work, co-authored scientific papers and raised a daughter.
There are “so many things that we have in common. A lot of the same goals, the same interests,” Mosely-Thompson said about her husband.
She said the awards she’s won do not define her as a person.
“Those are all wonderful, not to ever diminish getting an award, but those don’t make you who you are, and frankly they don’t make you a better scientist,” she said. “The goal is always the attainment and advancement of knowledge.”
However, the awards have opened doors and provided money for research.
She has donated money from speaking fees to the Ice Core Salvage fund at the Byrd Polar Research Center to help with repairs and replacement of equipment. Other funds have also been set aside for costs for maintaining infrastructure.
Both Mosley-Thompson and her husband enjoy poetry.
She quotes lines from Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If” as inspiration. Several lines from the poem have special meaning to her.
Two are, “Or walk with Kings — nor lose the common touch; let all men count with you but none too much,” she said.
For years, the Thompsons have not taken any vacations. Now they have a bucket list created with some friends and it includes a spring or summer trip to three national parks. A trip to Australia is also on the list.
While the researchers don’t have much time to watch football, they do make it to one or two OSU games a year.
“We love the band,” she said. “My most favorite part is when the Best Damn Band in the Land takes the field coming down the ramp. I would literally go to every game, you know, to see that except that I just don’t have the time.”
Mosley-Thompson was born in Charleston, W. Va., and was raised by a stay-at-home mother and a father who always worked.
As an only child, “I was essentially her project,” Mosley-Thompson said about her mother.
Her father was an insurance salesman. “My father was an amazing man. He loved people,” she said. He would often work with laborers who could not pay their premiums, and would cover their fees with no interest until they could pay him back.”
While growing up, she spent a lot of her time outside.
“My family didn’t get a television until I was 7 years old,” she said. “If I wanted information, I had to read it, and if I had spare time and nobody to play with, my mother said go read a book.”
Always interested in science, “I think I always knew I would be a scientist probably from middle school onward,” she said.
She said a high school physics teacher piqued her interest with great labs and experiments.
She came to OSU after seeing an advertisement about an Atmospheric Science program at OSU.
Mosley-Thompson has watched OSU develop over the years into a world-class research institution. Her favorite part of being here is the people.
“There’s just that sense of community and just the tremendous support at all kinds of levels that Lonnie and I have gotten over the years,” she said.
The support has been from the president of the university to the people who do maintenance on the building.
That sense of community, she said, “would be very hard to duplicate someplace else.”
