Walter E. Petrascheck-Preis 2020

Gabriella Koltai wird für ihre Forschungsarbeiten auf dem Gebiet der Paläoklimatologie ausgezeichnet.

Gabriella Koltai is currently a Postdoctoral researcher at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and at the University of Innsbruck. She obtained her PhD in Earth Sciences at the same university in 2017 studying past climate change. As an enthusiastic caver, she works on dripstones in caves and seeks to understand how and why climate and environment changed over thousands of years. She uses geochemical proxies in these carbonate deposits to learn about past temperature, precipitation and vegetation changes.

As part of a project founded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Gabriella´s work focuses on speleothems from India and China. These cave deposits record changes in the Asian monsoon system, which transports moisture from the Indian Ocean onto the Indian subcontinent and across the Himalayan-Tibetan plateau into eastern China during summer. She is trying to extract tiny amounts of water stored in the form of fluid inclusions in these stalagmites in order to disentangle the effect of atmospheric precipitation and local temperature changes on the key geochemical proxy (the oxygen isotope composition of calcite) widely used in paleoclimate reconstructions.

She also carries out research in the Eastern and Southern Alps on a unique type of cave deposits, cryogenic cave carbonates, that form in cave ice when cave air temperature is slightly below 0°C. These tiny crystals are indicators of permafrost thawing events in the past and she tries to characterize long-term mountain permafrost dynamics in the Eastern and Southern Alps.

Die Preisträgerin

Gabriella Koltai studierte Englisch und Geografie an der Universität Szeged, Ungarn. Nach Ihrem Studium arbeitete sie als Forschungsassistentin an der Ungarischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Das Doktoratsstudium im Fach Erdwissenschaften schloss sie 2017 ab. Anschließend hatte Gabriella Koltai eine PostDoc-Stelle am Institut für Geologie der Universität Innsbruck; seit 2019 arbeitet sie als Senior Scientist an diesem Institut.

Preise und Auszeichnungen (Auswahl):
Förderungspreis des Landes Tirol für Wissenschaft (2020), Dr Otto Seibert Wissenschafts-Förderung-Preis, Universität Innsbruck (2018), Jeno Cholnoky Karst and Cave Research Award (2018, 2009).