Marie CAVITTE

Marie CAVITTE

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Marie CAVITTE

Marie Cavitte is a climatologist and glaciologist with a focus on polar regions (Antarctica in particular) and our warming climate and is the valorisation manager for the BClimate team. Reponsiblities: build networks across disciplines, in particular on climate litigation and climate impacts and attribution science, communication of climate change and project fund raising. 

She holds a Bachelor's and Master's degree in Geology from the University of Cambridge (2007-2010) and a PhD in Glaciology from the University of Texas at Austin (2011-2017) where she specialized in using radar technology to study Antarctic ice and has contributed to the European Oldest Ice Beyond EPICA project, which aims to recover 1.5-million-year-old ice to study paleoclimate.

After a brief GIS consulting position at CapGemini, she joined the Earth and Life Institute at UCLouvain where she stayed 5 years (2019-2024) as a 2-yr postdoc, followed by a 3-year FRS-FNRS research fellow position. She worked on Antarctic snowfall evolution, quantifying the spatial representativeness of ice core data sets through model-data comparison and assimilation. During the winter of 2021-2022, Marie had the opportunity to carry out radar fieldwork in Antarctica, at a remote camp from the Belgian Princess Elisabeth Antarctica station.

Marie Cavitte is also committed scientist. She has been part of the leadership of several organizations promoting early-career researchers. She served as Editor-in-Chief of the EGU Cryosphere Blog for two years and is currently Co-President of the Association for Polar Early Career Scientists Belgium (APECS Belgium). She also collaborates with lawyers for climate litigation, artists to communicate science through the prism of art and participates in expert panels (Jubel.be, Avocats.be, Citizen Service, Louvain Finance School). Additionally, she gives interviews on climate change and polar regions on written, audio and TV press (RTBF, BX1, RTL). Marie Cavitte is involved in science for policy at the EU level: she understook a Bluebook traineeship in 2024 at the DG CLIMA (European Commission) and is currently the EGU's Cryopshere Division Policy Officer. She remains optimistic and actively involved in the fight to make a difference in the climate change conversations.

PhD research

Flow re-organization of the East Antarctic ice sheet across glacial cycles

Date 2011 - 2017
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Constraining the stability of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS) over glacial-interglacial timescales is important to both understand its sea level contributions in the past and predict its future contributions in a warming world. Constraining how fast the EAIS can deliver ice to the ocean is as important as how much. Total volume fluctuations can be inferred through the use of nunatak exposure ages and ice core dating as well as through ice sheet modeling reconstructions of the Antarctic Ice Sheet as a whole. However, the EAIS’s ice volume fluctuations over long timescales such as 100-kyr glacial cycles and short spatial scales such as single ice flow catchment are less well known. I establish a method for dating internal reflections from ice-penetrating radar data between the Vostok and Dome C ice core sites, and determine the associated uncertainties in depth and age. I constrain the stability of two catchments of the EAIS through the use of internal stratigraphy from ice-penetrating radar, dated using correlated ice cores, combined with 1D ice flow models to reconstruct past accumulation rates. Here, I show that the ice catchment at the South Pole was highly active during the last glacial maximum while the ice dome/divide at Dome C was fairly stable during the entire last glacial cycle. Enhanced flow reaching South Pole implies the EAIS’s interior is much more susceptible to changes than previously thought. The absence of flow re-organization at Dome C for the last glacial maximum in contrast to South Pole shows that flow re-organization can vary from catchment to catchment. In addition, the stability of the Dome C region for the last 128 kyrs is highly promising for the retrieval of 1.5 million-year-old ice. 1D inversions of the deep radar isochrones interpreted above the subglacial relief of the Little Dome C (LDC) surface dome, ~30 km south of Dome C, predict several 1.5 million-year-old ice drilling sites. However, the complicated basal radar internal stratigraphy above the LDC and the presence of subglacial lakes complicate the task of choosing an ice core drill site. The EAIS-wide internal stratigraphy from the extensive modern ice-penetrating radar data now available over the EAIS have improved our understanding of its configuration and stability on multiple scales and timescales, and provide a foundation for understanding East Antarctica’s future role in global sea level change.