Professor Liz Morris

speaker

376 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2026 last heard 2 Aug

Professor Liz Morris’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Desert Island Discs · Professor Liz Morris, glaciologist · 2 Aug 2026 podcast

And I was absolutely disgusted because I thought this was a very girly thing to do.

So I said, well, no, and I went off to see another lecturer, John Nye, who was a glaciologist and therefore was working in mountainous regions and said, well, what can I write this essay on, please?

Can I write on glaciers?

So he helped me.

And that was the start of becoming a glaciologist, because then after I graduated, I went on to become his doctoral student and start really my studies in glaciology then.

Tell me about what you learned from him.

Well, John Nye was an absolutely towering figure in my field.

You know, one of the absolute greats.

And he was very austere, a beautiful writer.

So his papers are an absolute example of how to write a scientific paper.

He did have one flaw, from my point of view, which was that his experience in experimental work had been with a very small and delicate thing called a bubble raft, which gave you some information about how crystals worked.

But the task he gave me as a student was to construct a model glacier, which involved very large heavy sheet metal, two inch thick, and large amounts of lead weights and...

It was generally a lumbering sort of experiment.

And I don't think John really, really knew what he asked me to do.

So where was it and what were you trying to find out with it?

John had really very, very nicely explained theoretically that there would be two processes that a glacier would use to get over its bumpy bed.

One would be just by bending the ice so it could go round the bump and

And the other would be by melting at the upstream and the water would flow down to the lower part and refreeze.

So regulation and plastic flow would be the two processes.

So I had to basically construct a lump of something that could be pulled through ice and demonstrate these two processes going on.

Showing 141–160 of 376 · page 8 of 19