Helen Amanda Fricker (above) was awarded the  2010 Martha T. Muse Prize for Science and Policy in Antarctica. Her work includes discovery of subglacial lakes in the Western Antarctic (left).

Helen Amanda Fricker, a glaciologist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, has been awarded the prestigious 2010 Martha T. Muse Prize for Science and Policy in Antarctica.  

Fricker is widely recognized for her discovery of active subglacial lakes, and she has shown that these lakes form dynamic hydrologic systems, where one lake can drain into another in a short period of time.  She is also known for her innovative research into Antarctic ice shelf mass budget processes such as iceberg calving and basal melting and freezing. 

"I am truly delighted to have been selected for this prestigious award," said Fricker, an associate professor at Scripps' Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics. "I am excited about the opportunities that this gives my research team at Scripps."

The prize is a $100,000 award funded by the Tinker Foundation and managed by the Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research (SCAR), a committee of the Paris-based International Council for Science.

The prize selection committee of leading Antarctic scientists and policymakers cited her leadership in the application of remote sensing techniques using laser altimetry to detect current changes in the Antarctic ice sheet in response to rising sea level and climate variability and her individual activities promoting educational outreach about Antarctic ice sheets.

Fricker will be awarded the prize and deliver the Muse Lecture at the American Geophysical Union meeting to be held in San Francisco in December 2010.

Scripps Institution of Oceanography, at UC San Diego, is one of the oldest, largest and most important centers for global science research and education in the world. The National Research Council has ranked Scripps first in faculty quality among oceanography programs nationwide. Now in its second century of discovery, the scientific scope of the institution has grown to include biological, physical, chemical, geological, geophysical and atmospheric studies of the earth as a system. Hundreds of research programs covering a wide range of scientific areas are under way today in 65 countries. The institution has a staff of about 1,300, and annual expenditures of approximately $155 million from federal, state and private sources. Scripps operates one of the largest U.S. academic fleets with four oceanographic research ships and one research platform for worldwide exploration. Scripps News: scrippsnews.ucsd.edu