Rachael Sanders

• Please introduce yourself.  

My name is Rachael Sanders, I’m a postdoc in the Polar Oceans team at BAS. 

• Tell us about your professional and academic career before becoming part of the BIOPOLE Community. 

I completed my undergraduate degree at the University of Liverpool, where I studied maths with oceans and climate science, 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, exploring drivers of 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 BIOPOLE?  

I’m a physical oceanographer working in Work Package 1. I’m using measurements of oxygen isotopes from the Arctic and Southern Ocean to determine the fraction of water that originates from different sources. By looking at the ratio of different oxygen isotopes, along with the salinity of the water samples, it is possible to calculate how much of the freshwater originated from sea ice, compared to glacial melt and precipitation.

• What have you enjoyed about BIOPOLE so far? 

It’s really nice to be working with such a diverse group of people with different academic backgrounds.

• 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.