Anne Grunow
Ohio State University, OH·Earth & Environmental Science
Getting a rock from Antarctica is extraordinarily expensive: it means a field season, aircraft, ships and fuel, all for samples that may already sit in someone's drawer. A curated archive of rocks already collected turns that problem around, letting researchers anywhere test new ideas about polar geology from existing material.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Education Research
- Topics
Polar Rock Repository
Antarctica
polar geology
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2030
What they work on
- Curate and expand the Polar Rock Repository collection, acquiring roughly 15,000 new geological samples over five years, including cores from the RAID and Winkie drilling operations and samples from polar cruises.
- Grow the repository's archives of sample images, petrographic thin sections (thin rock slices for mineral identification) and mineral separates used for chemical and age analyses.
- Maintain and improve a discoverable online database of physical samples and their metadata so investigators can locate material and plan Antarctic fieldwork, fulfilling Antarctic data management mandates.
- Operate education and outreach activities, including the "Polar Rock Box" program that loans Antarctic rock samples to schools, colleges and public audiences.
More about the research
The Polar Rock Repository at Ohio State maintains such a collection and lends geological samples and their accompanying data at no cost.
Why it matters
Free loans of already-collected Antarctic rocks let researchers answer new questions without the cost, logistics and environmental footprint of travel to remote polar sites, and preserve irreplaceable samples from drilling projects and cruises for future analyses. The searchable sample database supports transparency and reuse in polar earth science, and the Polar Rock Box program brings genuine Antarctic specimens into classrooms.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Wilson Espinoza
Texas State University, TX·Earth & Environmental Science
Measure how the strength of individual minerals contributes to overall rock strength, using nanoscale experiments on mineral interactions.
Kerstin Lehnert
Columbia University, NY·Earth & Environmental Science
Modernize EarthChem, an open geochemistry data repository, by re-engineering its systems for scale and building better human- and machine-readable tools for data discovery, visualization and analysis.
Samantha Hansen
University of Alabama, AL·Earth & Environmental Science
Build self-consistent models of the crust and mantle beneath Greenland by combining data from several seismic networks with a new seismic deployment in central-eastern Greenland.
The school
Ohio State University: 71 labs on PI Pages, $1.6B a year on research, 882 research doctorates a year.
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