ACE post-doc Elizabeth Shadwick has returned from Duke University in the US after winning a SCAR (Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research) fellowship. During her time at Duke, Dr Shadwick, a biogeochemist, was working with equilibrator inlet mass spectrometry (EIMS), a relatively new technique that can exclude the physical contribution to oxygen production in surface ocean waters so that scientists can specifically measure biological productivity. Dr Shadwick will be part of a team on a National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NZ) voyage leaving in February  that will use the technique to make measurements every minute along the vast transect between New Zealand and the Mertz Glacier region of east Antarctica. Ocean productivity is highly influential in the global climate, with the ocean producing 50% of atmospheric oxygen, and absorbing 30% of the carbon dioxide released by human activities over the past 50 years.

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