Skip to content
Women In Polar Science

Yulan Zhang, PhD

Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China

Yulan, wearing polar gear including boots, stands on a wooden walkway in Barrow, Alaska.

Yulan, wearing polar gear including boots, stands on a wooden walkway in Barrow, Alaska.

What’s the work that you do?

For the past decade, I have been working to understand pollutants and the environmental impacts they have on glacier melting, carbon and nitrogen cycles, and climate change in the cryospheric regions.

What keeps you going?

Climate change and what it means for human development in the future is a fascinating topic to study, and my fascination with it keeps me going. In particular, how will the cryosphere change under climate warming at the end of the 21st century? What role do carbon and nitrogen bio-geochemical processes in the cryosphere play in relation to climate change? What impacts do cryospheric changes have on climate change and sea level rise?

What’s your message to the world?

Black carbon, an anthropogenic pollutant, can hasten glacier melting. When glaciers melt and permafrost thaws, greenhouse gas emissions will increase, which has the potential to further warm our climate. We need to keep studying this to understand the role humans play in how our climate is changing.

Organisation: Northwest Institute of Eco-Environment and Resources, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China

Nationality: China China

Disciplines:

Cryospheric chemistry and environment

Connect:    

We are grateful to The Ocean Foundation for acting as our fiscal sponsor in the US, the Curtis and Edith Munson Foundation for sponsoring this project, and the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR) for supporting us.