Anne Hormes

Geologist, Co-Founder Girls on Ice Austria

I was fortunate to have a father who instilled in me that it doesn't matter what gender you are as long as you are on fire for a cause. Climbing and mountaineering are my passions and have driven my research interest in natural hazards and climate change for the past 25 years. I work on landslides and rockfalls in mountainous regions of Austria and Norway. My expertise ranges from fieldwork in alpine mountain regions and the Arctic to remote sensing and geochronological methods. In 2018, I founded the engineering company Sky4geo in Innsbruck to bring innovative drone and satellite radar monitoring into practice and to offer improved hazard zone maps and hazard susceptibility maps.

I have met many strong women, perhaps due to the fact that I spent over 10 years researching and living in the Arctic on Spitsbergen. There I met female tour guides who led ski tours and dog sled tours, female police officers who were also active in the Red Cross glacier rescue group at the same time. For several weeks I myself have led expeditions in sub-zero temperatures in tents to take rock samples from many high mountains on Spitsbergen. Through our work, we were able to reconstruct for the first time the vertical extent of the Svalbard-Barents Sea ice sheet during the last ice age. Studying past glacier extent versus climate change, can help us adjust climate models because we have again better understood another piece of the puzzle.

With my involvement in the Girls on Ice Austria association, I hope to inspire young girls and women that a career in the natural sciences is just as possible and rewarding as it is for their male student counterparts. Once you find your purpose in life, gender no longer matters. Time flies when you have fun.