Michele Koppes

A keeper of the stories of ice and stone, Dr. Michele Koppes is a Canada Research Chair in Landscapes of Climate Change, an Associate Professor of Geography at University of British Columbia, the Director of the Climate and Cryosphere Lab and a Senior TED Fellow.

Her passion is understanding how glaciers respond to climate change, and how glacier changes impact landscapes, waterscapes and people. She believes deeply that, in order to address the ongoing climate emergency, there is a great need for more place-based, integrated and embodied understandings of how the lives of the ice, the mountains, the rivers and the people who dwell among them are intertwined.

She spends her time exploring and collecting these acoustic stories in remote places all over the world, from the mountains of the Pacific Northwest to the Patagonian Andes, the Himalayas, the Tien Shan, the margin of the Greenland Ice Sheet, and Antarctica.