Paulina Rudnicka-Kępa

My name is Paulina Rudnicka-Kępa. I’m a third-year PhD student at the International Environmental Doctoral School in the Institute of Oceanology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. I am interested in marine environmental pollution in the era of global climate change. I started my adventure with this topic in 2016, when I had the opportunity to do an internship at the University of Salerno as part of the Erasmus + program. I cooperated with a team of scientists trying to construct the best possible device for treating wastewater from pharmaceuticals. However, my real adventure with the Ocean and the Arctic began in 2019, when I got interested in inorganic pollutants occurring in the environment and their sources. Heavy metals and radionuclides, which in high concentrations can be destructive to marine organisms, attracted my attention. So I started researching the impact of the so-called secondary pollution sources (e.g. melting glaciers) on their concentration in the marine environment. This is a relatively new topic and little explored, especially in the West Spitsbergen fjords. In 2020, I participated in a two-month cruise (AREX 2020) to Spitsbergen to collect samples for my doctoral dissertation. It was a time when I experienced the problem of a warming climate in the Arctic myself. That is why I care so much about making people aware of the importance of caring for the environment. And how much we contribute to its contamination, not only with the compounds we produce but also with those that have been stored in ice for hundreds of years.