What Ice Can Teach Us with Dr. M Jackson

Meet Dr. M Jackson.

She’s been a geographer, glaciologist, writer, National Geographic Society Explorer, and TED Fellow, and whether it’s Greenland, Iceland, Antarctica, or the Arctic, Dr. M Jackson can be placed right in the middle of it and know exactly where she is.

With only her crampons and ears attuned to the sounds of glaciers, M is able to define her position, as well as the state of the ice below her feet.

This is a conversation about glaciers - What are they? What do they tell us? It’s also a conversation about ego and facing grief. How can we hold two things to be true and still show up to do world changing work?

M is a champion for the expansion of who gets to practice glacier science and who gets to produce glacier knowledge, and her calling to everyone is a shift in mindset: to look at what's next and to remember that global issues require global solutions.

What M wants you to know:

“ I want your listeners to come away with a full understanding that science is storytelling and storytelling is science. These things are the same, and then each person gets to have space in there to figure out how they're gonna tell the story, and I love that 'cause it's freeing.”

Rapid fire: 

• What is your favorite glacier? “I want to see glaciers in Papua New Guinea. They’re my current favorite because I’m obsessed with them but I’ve never seen them.”
  
  
• One word you’d want to associate with ice besides ‘melting’: Strength, transformation, hope
  
  
• What is it that you do to reset yourself: Put my phone away and pour myself a cup of coffee.

Going beyond the episode:

• Learn more about M and her work
• Check out M's Books

For all resources and links mentioned in this episode, read the full guide here: https://www.alphapodcast.studio/m-jackson

With gratitude to the organizations whose archival materials and recordings helped bring alpha to life:

• New Mexico PBS, Critical Mass: Women in Science (audio)
• NASA Image & Video Library
• American Archive of Public Broadcasting