April Abbott, University of Minnesota Duluth student (MS ’11 Geology) and student researcher, said she chose UMD for her master’s degree because of the Large Lakes Observatory (LLO) and the R/V Blue Heron. “The program and mission had an exotic feel to it,” she says. When she began her work on her thesis, that “exotic feel” became very real.
Africa’s Lake Malawi became a destination. Abbott found the nights “unbearably hot.” The bunk room had little airflow, so, “We'd try to sleep up on the top deck above the wheelhouse,” Abbott says. ”But it was the rainy season, so... we'd get massive thunderstorms in the early morning… and that would send us scrambling back to the bunks.”
The beauty of the crystal-clear blue water and the unusual behavior of living things made the voyage unforgettable. Abbott had never heard of “fly chimneys,” before. “When the lake fly larvae hatched, they all hatched at once, and flew straight up into the air,” she says. “There were so many it looked like a stack of smoke coming off the water.” She was warned that if she ended up in one of the hatches, to cover her head and breathe slowly. “They're so thick, they pose a suffocation risk!"
The drilling platform used on Lake Malawi in 2005
Lake Malawi is one of the world’s oldest and deepest lakes, and Abbott’s crew spent the voyage collecting suspended sediment from the water column to better understand signals preserved in sediment cores recovered on previous expeditions to Lake Malawi.
Abbott’s thesis entailed geochemical analyses of a 380-meter-long sediment core recovered by drilling a site at 690 meter depth in Lake Malawi in 2005. She generated a history of East African temperature that extended back 1.3 million years before present – the longest, high-resolution temperature record that presently exists for the African continent. Along with Regents Professor Thomas Johnson, Professor Josef Werne, and others, Abbott’s research was published in Nature in 2016.
A Prestigious Award
Abbott was recently named a recipient of The Oceanography Society’s 2021 Early Career Award. The Oceanography Society (TOS) selects up to three people for the award on a biannual basis. The recipients are chosen for contributions and impact, and potential for future achievement in the field of oceanography.
The selection committee for TOS noted, “Dr. Abbott’s research on the cycling of rare earth elements (REE) in the ocean identified major benthic fluxes of REE’s, which if integrated to basing scale are of sufficient magnitude to balance the global budget – a breakthrough for a longstanding puzzle in Abbott’s field. She further traced this flux mechanistically to diagenesis of clay minerals at the sea floor, challenging previous paradigms the assumed REE’s were cycled primarily through oxides and Oxyhydroxides.” The other two 2021 recipients for the Early Career Award are Ryan Abernathey, and James Watson.
On the Water
Abbott’s journey includes extensive work on U.S. lakes, including the Great Lakes. She grew up in the Finger Lakes region of New York state. There, her father was the first mate aboard the R/V William Scandling, a 65-foot, steel-hulled vessel owned and operated by Hobart and William Smith Colleges, where Abbott first attended college. While studying for her BSc in 2009, Abbott did field work aboard the William Scandling, sailing the New York Barge Canal System to Cayuga and Oneida Lakes, the lower Great Lakes, and the Hudson River.
In addition to the MS degree from UMD, she received a Ph.D. from the College of Earth Ocean & Atmospheric Sciences from Oregon State University in 2016, where she served as the principal investigator aboard the R/V Oceanus. Finally, she received an Associate Fellow of Higher Degree Research Supervision from Macquarie University (Australia) in 2019.
Australia Beckoned
In 2016, Abbott began as an early career geochemist with experience working with both organic and inorganic paleoclimate proxies. Since 2017, Abbott has been the director of the Collaborative Australian Post-graduate Sea Training Alliance Network (CAPSTAN). Abbott is a lecturer/assistant professor in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Macquarie University, conducting research or collecting samples. “I am actively redesigning our marine science degree program, including leading our first offering of the marine science capstone... and reorganizing the curriculum for our 200-level marine geoscience offering.”
She does much of her research aboard the The R/V Investigator, a 300-foot vessel capable of carrying a crew of 60 people. It’s Australia’s only dedicated blue-water research facility.
University of Minnesota Regents Professor Thomas Johnson said, "April spent long hours in Prof. Werne’s biogeochemistry laboratory in LLO, often working long into the night. She accomplished a most impressive number of sediment analyses for a masters student, and maintained a cheerful presence throughout her time at UMD."
Erik Brown, UMD associate vice chancellor for graduate education and research, also congratulated Abbott on her award. “I am confident that April's work at UMD helped to set her on a career trajectory that has led to the Oceanography Society Early Career Award,” he says. “We’re proud to include her among our most accomplished alumni.”
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Banner photo above: (l-r) Melissa Berke (PhD student at LLO, now faculty at the University of Notre Dame), April Abbott, Messias Maccuiane (one of the crew members of the hydrographic survey vessel Timba), and Josef Werne (associate professor at LLO/chemistry & biochemistry faculty) on the R/V Ndunduma in January 2010.
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