Dartmouth's School of Ice

Eighteen university and college professors from Dartmouth College’s School of Ice recently visited the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center’s laboratory in Hanover, New Hampshire.

The School of Ice is a program of the U.S. Ice Drilling Program Office, which is funded by the National Science Foundation. Dr. Mary Albert, a retired ERDC Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory researcher, and current professor of engineering at Dartmouth’s Thayer School of Engineering, serves as the IDPO executive director.

The School of Ice program is designed for college faculty who teach at minority-serving institutions or historically black colleges and universities to help build their background knowledge about ice core science and climate change and gain activities and labs for transferring information to their students.

CRREL Polar Researcher Dr. Zoe Courville coordinated the visit with a tour of the Coldroom Complex and the Ice Engineering Facility. Presentations were made by Terry Melendy, Dr. Emily Asenath-Smith, Dr. Don Perovich, Bruce Elder and Courville.

“The Phoenix Runway Project, presented by Terry Melendy, was an example of solving a real world problem in an amazing and creative way,” said Louise Huffman, Dartmouth’s Ice Drilling Program Office’s Education and Public Outreach Program manager. “By letting us visit CRREL, it opened our eyes to the fascinating world of science and engineering, and we can now share that with the world through our students. Perhaps it will motivate the next generation of engineers!”

Courville hopes this visit will lead to further opportunities to collaborate on outreach opportunities with the professors and their students.

“The group was very engaged during the tour and seemed to very much appreciate the range of projects we work on in the lab,” said Courville.