ACE CRC Carbon scientist Elizabeth Shadwick has won a trip to the Planet Under Pressure conference in London in March 2012, where she will represent fellow early-career researchers from the international research project LOICZ (Land-Ocean Interactions in the Coastal Zone). Dr Shadwick won the trip through her participation in September in a young scientists’ forum in Yantai, China, where she was one of 25 participants from 15 countries.  Senior scientists judged contributions to a series of workshops at the conference to determine who would represent Young LOICZ, which covers the natural and social sciences, in London. “I also made an oral presentation at the Open Science Conference comparing work from my PhD in the Canadian Arctic and a similar system in the Antarctic,” Dr Shadwick said. Before joining ACE in February 2011, Dr Shadwick completed her PhD in Chemical Oceanography at Dalhousie University in Canada. At the Planet Under Pressure conference Dr Shadwick will present research about recent changes to the inorganic carbon system in the Mertz Polynya region of East Antarctica. She is working on this research with fellow ACE/CSIRO scientists Bronte Tilbrook and Steve Rintoul. Dr Shadwick has also been named the first chairperson of Young LOICZ.  LOICZ provides science that links land and sea, incorporating biology, chemistry and physics research from coastal zones globally. It is a core project of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme and the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change. The purpose of the Planet Under Pressure conference in 2012 is to provide a comprehensive update, based on the latest science, of our knowledge of the Earth system and the pressure our planet is now under. It will focus on climate, ecological degradation, human well-being, planetary thresholds, food security, energy, governance across scales and poverty alleviation, and aims to provide scientific leadership towards the 2012 UN Rio+20 conference.

---