Episode 101: The Thing with Peter Neff, Matthew Siegfried, and Daniella McCahey

Historians At The Movies

This week we dive into the history and science behind Antarctica and question who made it out: Childs or MacReady? The Thing is a 100% PERFECT film. Grab your flamethrower and join in.
About our guests:
Peter Neff is a glaciologist and climate scientist working primarily to develop glacier ice core records of past climate, environmental conditions, and atmospheric chemistry. Peter’s current research focuses on better understanding recent climate of changing coastal regions in West Antarctica, areas which play a large role in uncertainty for future projections of sea level rise. Peter is also working to capture the last 200-500 years of hydroclimate variability in southwestern British Columbia, Canada, through recovering and developing the southernmost annually-resolved ice core record in North America, from Mount Waddington in the Coast Mountains. Peter is also the Director of Field Research and Data for the Center for Oldest Ice Exploration (COLDEX), a National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center that seeks to find the oldest possible ice core records of past climate preserved in Antarctica. Peter shares widely about ice core climate science via Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram.
Matthew Siegfried is a glaciologist who uses satellite remote sensing techniques in combination with field-based and airborne geophysical methods to understand physical processes of Earth’s glaciers and ice sheets. He runs the Mines Glaciology Laboratory, where the team collects and synthesizes ground-, air-, and space-based datasets in an effort to span the spatial (centimeters to 100s of km) and temporal (minutes to centuries) on which these processes occur. He is particularly interested in processes at the ice-bed interface, which lies hidden beneath 10s to 1000s of meters of ice at the intersection between glaciology, hydrology, geology, microbiology, and oceanography. He strives to work with a diverse set of researchers to create a unique perspective on the role of subglacial processes within the larger global Earth system. As a polar scientist, Matt is also committed to maintaining an open discussion of the changing cryosphere, having collaborated with institutions ranging from local elementary schools to the U.S. State Department in an effort to facilitate our conversation about the local, regional, and global impacts of changes at the Earth’s poles. Matt is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Geophysics at Colorado School of Mines and is affiliated faculty with the Hydrologic Science and Engineering Program and the Humanitarian Engineering Program.
Daniella McCahey's primary research attempts to connect Antarctic geographies to greater world history. Her current book project examines the United Kingdom’s 1955-1958 Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic Expedition, arguing that the way this project unfolded demonstrated a scientific community unable to cope with the twin pressures of decolonization and the Cold War. Dr. McCahey has broad interests and has authored/co-authored articles and scholarly book chapters on topics ranging from the media-savvy of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, to paleontology and popular culture in the 1990s, to pornography in Antarctic research stations. She is also conducting ongoing international collaborative research projects on the history of permafrost science and on the history of the British Empire’s use of science in its Southern Ocean empire.