Image featuring a female postgraduate student standing in front of a sea of ice in the Artic

Pudding Seminar: Ming Khan, 'Ming's Journey to the Arctic'

Abstract: Over the summer, Newnham PhD student Ming Khan spent a month on board the Research Vessel Polarstern (managed by the Alfred Wegener Institute, AWI), sailing from Bremerhaven, Germany, to the Fram Strait in the Arctic Ocean for the Expedition PS143-1. For her PhD, Ming uses seabed photographs taken by the Ocean Floor Observation and Bathymetry System (OFOBS), from Antarctica, to study the ecology of deep sea animals. Two years ago, in a previous Pudding Seminar, she introduced the weird and wonderful animals of Antarctic invertebrates from 65 million years ago, and how different they are to the ones today. During PS143-1, Ming was able to learn how to operate OFOBS on the other side of the planet, and gain an introduction to polar field work. In this Pudding Seminar, she will introduce AWI’s HAUSGARTEN long term ecological observatory in the Arctic, an overview of the many science experiments being conducted on the ship, highlights from the OFOBS (which Ming calls “Deep Sea TV”), including from the deepest part of the Arctic Ocean in the Molloy Deep at 5500 m water depth, and life on a 24 hour working ship.

Biography: Tasnuva Ming Khan is a 4th-year PhD Student in the Department of Zoology and Museum of Zoology, and the British Antarctic Survey. In the Deep Time Ecology group, she studies ecological relationships of Antarctic invertebrates, both from the modern oceans and in the fossil record, from the centimeter to the kilometer scale. She holds BS in Earth Sciences from Cornell University, USA and an MSc in Geosciences from the Friedrich Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany.

All staff, students, senior members and alumnae are very warmly invited to attend the Pudding Seminars. Talks usually last between 20-25 minutes, followed by time for questions, comments and discussion before we finish at 1.50pm, to allow people to get to 2pm appointments. Please note that coffee and cake will be available from 1 o’clock with the seminar starting promptly at 1.15pm. Details of all our seminars can be found at: https://newn.cam.ac.uk/research/pudding-seminars