A minor regret Claire Parkinson ’70 has from her time at Wellesley is that she waited until her senior year to take the class that ended up exciting her the most: astronomy. A climatologist for NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center for more than four decades, she says her first experiences in the Whitin Observatory were amazing.

“We got the keys and could go in the middle of the night—we’d go figure out where to point the telescope to see what we wanted to look at,” she says. She remembers being awestruck while viewing a globular cluster, a conglomeration of stars held together by gravity, up close. (“One little point of light in the sky becomes thousands on thousands,” she says.) The rings of Saturn looked just like a picture postcard, and the mountains on the moon suddenly became three-dimensional.

“The fact that here on Earth we can look at the sun and figure out what its chemical composition is, that was amazing to me,” she says. “[That we had a] means of being able to understand what chemicals are in the sun even though there was no possibility of going there—that really opened my mind to science.”

Neither of Parkinson’s parents had attended a four-year college, so she says she didn’t know what to expect from Wellesley. She was interested in math, loving the power and precision of it, but she was also attentive to the surrounding social issues of the late 1960s; she was a strong supporter of the Civil Rights Movement and was critical of the Vietnam War.

“By the time I was a senior at Wellesley, I realized I can’t just go into theoretical math as a career, I can’t go into some ivy tower and spend my life with abstract symbols not knowing what some mathematical theory might be used for,” she says. Although she remained a math major, she shifted her focus to science, to the slight disappointment of the legendary Alice Schafer, Helen Day Gould Professor of Mathematics.

Parkinson’s passion for science and understanding the broader world became a lifelong pursuit. At Goddard, which she joined in 1978, she became one of the world’s leading climatologists, pioneering how polar ice is monitored from satellites and helping develop computer models and analysis techniques that illustrate why it is essential to the Earth’s climate system and also reveal the changes occurring within it.

But she might not have made those discoveries if she hadn’t first gotten on the boat. After Wellesley, Parkinson went back home to Vermont. She had trouble finding permanent full-time work, and while she pondered what to do next she started to focus on the continent of Antarctica. The Antarctic Treaty had been signed when she was in grade school, preserving the entire continent for peaceful purposes and scientific research only. Parkinson went to her local library to research how she was going to manifest her vision of traveling there (she notes that she has always liked cold weather), and she learned about the Institute of Polar Studies at Ohio State University. She wrote to the center asking to join an Antarctica expedition, and she managed to get aboard as a graduate student.

Parkinson says she had not realized just how rare it was for women to be allowed on Antarctic expeditions.

“I was the only female on the ship going down and the only female on the island,” she says. “None of that bothered me, though the captain of the ship was horrified when we arrived.” While on Deception Island, just off the Antarctic mainland, she measured the flow of ice into a volcanic crater that had erupted a few years earlier.

She then spent a preliminary summer followed by two years at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., where she developed a sea ice model, which became her dissertation work. She was presenting her results at a conference in Seattle when she met a scientist from NASA’s Goddard Space Center, who asked if she had a job lined up. “NASA was so iconic,” she says. “I just knew that was immediately my top choice.”

At the time, NASA was still in the early stages of using data from satellites to observe Earth and its climate. Parkinson and her group analyzed data from these early satellites for information about sea ice in order both to develop techniques for analyzing it and to create atlases of the ice coverage—the beginnings of an effort that is now a cornerstone of climate science.

As satellite data and capabilities improved, she and her colleagues showed prominent long-term decreases in Arctic sea ice and that after decades of gradual increases and fluctuations, Antarctic sea ice also had began to decrease. The research became fundamental to scientists’ understanding of climate science and climate change. In 2020, Parkinson was awarded NASA’s distinguished service medal, its highest honor, for outstanding research on global sea ice cover and climate change as well as for serving as project scientist on the Aqua satellite mission. Launched in 2002, Aqua transmits ocean, land, ice, and atmospheric data that are widely used by scientists around the world. (After an unexpectedly long life, the satellite will go dark sometime in the next several years.)

Parkinson marvels at the increasing awareness of climate science and how much easier it is to collect and analyze data than when she started in the 1970s. “None of us had computers at our desk,” she says. “We had to get information over to the main computers, and get plots drafted by draftsmen. Everything was slower and more tedious than [it is] now.

“Almost nobody was interested in Arctic sea ice or Antarctica sea ice. This ended up being great for me—I’m basically a shy person, and I was way, way, way more shy back then.”

By the late 1990s, she says, it became clear to her and her colleagues that Arctic sea ice was decreasing. She was the lead author of a 1999 paper that used satellite data to show decreases in the Arctic from the late 1970s to the late 1990s. She has since been a leading voice helping the public better understand what’s happening with the Earth’s climate and why we must be smart about finding solutions, which she explains in her 2010 book, Coming Climate Crisis?: Consider the Past, Beware the Big Fix.

In 2011, Parkinson led a “Women of Goddard” outreach effort that resulted in the book Women of Goddard: Careers in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, and she has also written a book on the history of Western science.

In 2004, Parkinson became the first female recipient of the Goldthwait Polar Medal from the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at Ohio State University for her outstanding contributions to polar research—the same university she had joined on her first Antarctic expedition.

Parkinson’s colleagues say her research is a key reason the public is now engaged in global climate change.

“She was a pathfinder, looking at the ice as a reflection of how we are living our lives on this planet,” James Garvin, chief scientist at the Goddard Space Flight Center, told the Partnership for Public Service when Parkinson was a finalist for a 2020 Service to America medal. “The impact of her work is hard to put into words. It’s planetary. It’s critical and paradigm shifting.”