SPEARFISH, S.D. (AP) - A Spearfish native has worked her way up to a pretty cool job - literally.
Jennifer Mercer has worked her way from Antarctica to the Arctic Ocean, doing atmospheric and snow studies. Now, she’s the Acting Section Head for the Arctic Sciences Section of the National Science Foundation.
Mercer said her journey into the Arctic started in college with her interest in photography and journalism, when her mom bought her a coffee table book, “Poles Apart,” by famous nature photographer Galen Rowell.
“It is a book that contrasts the Arctic against the Antarctic. I remember looking through it and thinking someday I’m going to go to these places. I carried it with me. I didn’t know how I was going to go to those places, but that was the first conscious thought I had of anything related to traveling to the polar regions.”
Mercer started her years at Black Hills State University as a mass communications major, and worked for the Black Hills Pioneer sports department. But just before her sophomore year she switched her major to environmental physical science.
“I had professors at BHSU who were really good mentors, as far as taking an interest in their students’ strengths and encouraging us to think about what we could do,” she said.
Those professors recognized Mercer’s natural talent and encouraged her to pursue graduate school. After paying hundreds of dollars in application fees to schools across the west, a postcard about Dartmouth College in New Hampshire caught her eye. With a reasonable application rate of just $15, Mercer decided to take a chance.
Right after she was accepted to Dartmouth, the small town girl who had never traveled east of the Mississippi was accepted into a student fellowship program at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod.
“When I graduated in 1997, I packed up my little truck and drove across the country through many states that I had never visited,” Mercer said. “I lived on Cape Cod for the summer, working for the Oceanographic Institution and then in the fall I moved to New Hampshire to start graduate school. My research was focused on reconstructing past climate and environmental conditions using ocean sediments. I spent a lot of time on ships and a lot of time at sea, collecting samples to analyze.”
Five years later, after finishing her graduate degree, Mercer said a professor who was running a research team in Antarctica invited her to join his team working in the Dry Valleys near McMurdo Station, the Black Hills Pioneer reported.
“I ran to his office and said yes,” she said. “That started my career in polar science. A few months after I graduated, I started working for him, and in 2002 I took my first trip to Antarctica.”
Mercer arrived at Williams Field (a snow runway) near McMurdo Station on a ski-equipped LC-130 military plane, in the middle of a snow storm with white-out conditions. The Spearfish native took the weather in stride.
“We know what that’s like in South Dakota,” she said. “Somebody sort of appeared out of the snow and said ‘come with me.’ It was amazing. It’s amazing to stand in places where very few people have ever been. It’s just vast. It’s similar in some ways to those areas of the prairie in western South Dakota and eastern Wyoming, where you can just look and see for miles and miles.”
That experience solidified Mercer’s love for the polar regions, as she worked to further her career in academia and then later transitioned over to civil service in the federal government. Since then she’s made nine trips to Antarctica and more than a dozen trips (she’s lost count) to the Arctic to either conduct research or oversee research operations.
“Antarctica is a continent in the south, surrounded by ocean. The Arctic in the north is an ocean, surrounded by land. In many places in the Arctic, it’s very pure and there is no smell. In Antarctica, the area around McMurdo Station, the largest research station on the continent, a lot of times you smell diesel fuel because everything runs off of diesel. But once you get away from the research station there are no smells. It’s very pure.”
But venturing into the coastal villages of Greenland, Mercer said blueberry shrubs, animals and wildflowers fill the pure air with the aroma of nature. “So, there are different smells in the Arctic depending on where you are,” she said.
The pure air and vast white landscape on a largely untouched territory are part of the beauty of the polar regions. But in an area where temperatures can get as high as 32 degrees Fahrenheit, and as low as negative 60, 70 or below, researchers have learned how to adapt to extreme temperatures. From regulating diet to include high carbs and good fats to insulate the body, staying away from caffeine and alcohol that naturally cools the body down, and making sure to change socks regularly, Mercer has learned a lot about staying warm.
“We have a rule in the Arctic and Antarctic and it’s ‘change your socks, change your attitude,’” Mercer said. “It’s amazing how much you will sweat in your clothes and in your boots, and not realize that you’re sweating. You might feel extremely cold, but your feet are actually sweating. So, if you change into a dry pair of socks it can really change your entire day.”
“The other thing I have to convince people of is if you have to pee, go,” she continued. “Your body spends a lot of energy warming your bladder, so if it’s full your body spends time heating that. If you evacuate that then your body doesn’t have to waste heat on keeping your bladder warm. It’s the worst thing, if you think about it. You don’t want to go out into the snow and pull your pants down, because it seems even colder. But as soon as you do, you feel so much warmer.”
After finishing her first research trip to Antarctica in 2003, Mercer said she took a break from life in the eastern U.S. and returned to her home area, taking a job at the University of Wyoming as an atmospheric scientist. She continued doing research in the Antarctic until 2009, when she joined government service with the U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Lab. Then, in 2016, Mercer was hired as a program officer for the National Science Foundation. In that capacity she provided Arctic research support and logistics, a job she still holds today.
“I oversee all of our U.S. research operations in the country of Greenland,” she said. “It’s a big job. We send about 400 researchers and contractors to Greenland per year. I coordinate all of that by working with the government of Greenland, with our U.S. military, with our State Department, with our contractors, and with my colleagues within the NSF and all of our researchers who are spread throughout the U.S.”
The best part about her job, Mercer said, “I get to make a lot of science happen.”
Currently, Mercer said she manages research across all science disciplines, including glaciologists and snow/ice scientists studying glaciers, sea ice and the ice sheets; biologists studying polar bears; and atmospheric scientists measuring clouds, gases, and particles in the atmosphere.
“The Arctic is really important in understanding how quickly things are changing and how that affects the rest of the planet,” she said, explaining that much of the research helps us to understand climate change.
“The jet stream is more unpredictable than it used to be,” she said. “I remember when I was a kid, watching the nightly news and the weather, and you would see the jet stream as this steady line across the U.S. Now the jet stream is this up and down, wobbly thing. That’s because of the sea ice melt in the Arctic. The sea ice covering the Arctic Ocean has melted considerably over the last few decades. That sea ice used to cover the entire Arctic Ocean and created some stability in the atmosphere. That’s the jet stream we remember seeing on the weather reports when we were kids. Now it’s not stable, and it wobbles and we get these polar fronts that come down and create massive snow storms and really cold temperatures.”
Mercer’s new role as the acting section head for the Arctic Sciences Section of the National Science Foundation is a 90-day appointment that will last until NSF officials have filled the position permanently. But her job to provide real support for research in the polar regions is a permanent position with the NSF.
“We have a team of 15 people who manage Arctic Sciences for the National Science Foundation,” she said. “We work regularly with other U.S. agencies and with our international counterparts. Eight nations have territory in the Arctic (called the Arctic Eight), including the U.S., Canada, Denmark (Greenland), Iceland, Norway, Finland, Sweden, and the Russian Federation. In addition, several other countries conduct research there, including some of the Asian countries that send their research vessels to the Arctic Ocean. So we have to coordinate internationally as well. Our leadership role in these efforts is to make sure the U.S. is funding the best and most cutting-edge science to understand the Arctic.”
As Mercer enjoys her role in supporting research, she said she’s often asked to speak with high school students who may also be interested in the sciences. She particularly enjoys talking with youth in her home state.
“For all students and kids in South Dakota, think big,” she said. “Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do it. Don’t let anyone limit your thinking. Just try. The key thing for any of the STEM fields is persistence. You don’t have to be the smartest kid in the class. You should consistently get good grades, but it’s more about being persistent and not giving up. That’s really important.”
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