Michelle Worek obtained her Bachelor’s degree in Geosciences at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and her Master’s in Earth Sciences at the ETH Zürich. In her master thesis, she studied the sources and sinks of Alpine glacier-derived carbon.
At PSI, Michelle Worek will investigate if the current state of glaciation in the European Alps is unprecedented in the context of the last 10’000 years (the Holocene). She will apply an innovative micro-radiocarbon technique for dating ice with accelerator mass spectrometry, previously developed in our laboratory. With this technique to determine the age of the oldest ice from the bottom of selected Alpine glaciers, combined with insight from a suit of other glacio-chemical tracers, she will seek to deduce timing of past glacier coverage and glacier formation at higher elevations, for which - so far - data is lacking.