Mr Vice-Chancellor,

Until the 1980s, opportunity did not knock even once at the door of most women who wanted a career in polar science research. That was before Liz Morris strode into the arena. Then, the best of polar scientists, who were just men, knocked politely at her door and waited their turn. Liz was the first, and so far only, woman to be President of the International Commission on Snow and Ice and the International Glaciological Society; the two most prestigious and powerful international organisations in cold region science. She acted as an exemplar for the many women who have since entered glaciology on a more equal footing and become eminent polar scientists in their own right.

A passion for the subject, an iron will and great fortitude are essential attributes to have broken into the slowly moving, male-dominated, glaciology bastions, and Liz has these in abundance.

It might be odd to note that none of Liz’s grandparents or parents were scientists. Her maternal grandparents grew up in South Wales, in the mining community of Bargoed, where her grandmother was an important member of the community, the local midwife. Her paternal grandfather was a groom and her grandmother a cook. Her parents both studied English here at the University of Bristol, where they also both qualified as English teachers. They moved to Chiswick in West London, where Liz and her sister were both brought up.  A friend of her parents at Bristol was the Nobel Laureate physicist, Cecil Powell, who formed a lasting impression on them. Their recollections of their times here in Bristol seemed to resonate with Liz as a schoolgirl, because she discovered a great aptitude and bent for physics, rather than the Arts. She also loved mountains, a common passion for those living in the smoke. She followed her parents and came to Bristol, but in Liz’s case to read for a Physics degree. She was determined to mix her passions for physics and the mountains if that were possible.  Her opportunity quickly came when her tutor asked her to write an essay on a topic of her choice. She, of course, chose mountains and was set the lady-like subject of “suitable clothing for mountain conditions”. Scorning this, she appealed to John Nye, one of the world’s premier glaciologists, for an alternative topic – ice sheets! So it was that Liz become interested in ice sheets and modelling how they flow slowly over the landscapes they blanket, so much so that she studied for a PhD under John’s supervision. It was a happy and productive time, despite John’s disapproval of her habit of eating fish and chips in the lab during long drawn out ice flow experiments.  I hasten to add that health and safety regulations prevent this type of activity nowadays.

There were few opportunities for glaciologists when Liz graduated, so she moved to Dundee for 18 months working as an X-Ray crystallographer. Her colleagues approved of this topic believing, perhaps because of Dorothy Hodgkin, that ‘women were good at that sort of thing’.  However, Liz hankered to return to glaciology.  She moved to Norwich to work, again, with another of the world’s premier glaciologists, Geoffrey Boulton. One of the innovative things they did was to install an automatic pressure sensor beneath the bed of Glacier d’Argentière, in the French Alps.  When the recording system failed, Liz became a very able replacement for the automatic pressure sensor, spending weeks living under the glacier taking measurements every hour. This type of fieldwork was much more to Liz’s liking, but the style of not being her own woman was not.

She applied for a mathematical modelling post at NERC’s Institute of Hydrology, Wallingford, and started to specialise in snow hydrology, including studies of acid rain and turbulent heat transfer