Before coming to Alaska, Sarah Mincks was living in London working at the Natural History Museum. Her research there focused on the Antarctic—a world away from the arctic setting of the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus.

“Every day when I rode home on the train I would think about being able to reach out my arms and not touch another person,” says Mincks about her time in London.

But plenty of room is what Mincks now has, with Alaska as her new research lab—and plenty of water to keep this oceanographer busy.

There are many theories that suggest that the deep sea might have been populated by organisms that evolved on the continental shelves at the poles. Mincks will spend her time as a postdoctoral fellow looking into these theories by studying the evolutionary connections between polar shelf animals and the creatures in the deep sea.

In addition, Mincks will be studying how changing amounts of sea ice is affecting where sea-floor animals are living. While both poles are showing signs of climate change in the form of decreasing amounts of sea ice, the two environments are fundamentally different. Mincks believes that comparisons between the two will lead to important insights into the role of sea ice in polar marine ecosystems.

“So ultimately I’m interested in figuring out how the changing sea ice coverage is going to affect the sea-floor ecosystem,” says Mincks, “because this has telescopic effects on the animals that feed on the seafloor organisms, like the gray whale, fishes and crabs.”

It’s this kind of big-picture thinking that drives Mincks’ science.

“We’ve obviously come up against a wall here with climate change,” she says. “And I think, gee, wouldn’t it have been nice to have known a little bit more about that before we started making decisions that have such a big impact on the world?”

Mincks’ contributions will support the overall IPY effort of bringing together polar science to gain a better understanding of the world.

“You have to focus in and focus in until it seems like you’re looking at the minutia,” says Mincks. “But it takes a lot of people working on the minutia to put the big picture together.”

But all in all, what Mincks wants folks to know is that scientists like her are people, too.

“We’re just normal people who do normal things most of the time,” says Mincks. Perhaps she’ll be thinking about that when she’s cruising the Chukchi Sea looking for samples.

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