Agathe Lise-Pronovost

University of Melbourne

Science Team

Agathe Lise-Pronovost is an Australia Research Council DECRA Fellow and Lecturer at The University of Melbourne. She is Chair of the Science Committee for the Australian and New Zealand Consortium for International Ocean Discovery (ANZIC-IODP) and joins the SWAIS2C team as a paleomagnetist. Her research is focused on the Earth's magnetic field history in the Southern Hemisphere and the many applications of magnetism to paleosciences.

She is particularly interested in high-resolution records, to reconstruct changes at the 'human timescale' and develop regional paleomagnetic dating. She uses a multiproxy approach to paleomagnetism and works with marine and lake sediments, speleothems, lava flow and archaeological artefacts. She sailed on oceanographic missions in Baffin Bay and the Gulf of Saint-Lawrence, completed her PhD in the framework of ICDP project PASADO, and has extensive experience with continental lake sediment drilling in Australia.

What is your role on the SWAIS2C project?

I am a paleomagnetist based in Australia and my role on the SWAI2C, is as part of the paleomagnetism and chronostratigraphy team. This is supported by ANZIC-ICDP-Auscope.

In your own words, what is the SWAIS2C project about?

International multi-disciplinary exploration of the sediment archive under the South West Antarctic Ice Sheet.

What are you most excited about learning (or possibly learning) as a result of the SWAIS2C project?

I am excited to see if we can learn new things about Earth's magnetic field behavior in the Western Antarctic region. I will be looking for periods when marine sediments accumulated rapidly to recover high resolution sub-millennial timescale records of the Earth's magnetic field at this high latitude location. I’m most excited about things like, how fast can the Earth magnetic field change? and what does a geomagnetic excursion or reversal looks like in Antarctica?