[3] She went on to receive both her master's degree and her PhD in geography from Ohio State University, where she focused on climatology and atmospheric science.
With this early research, she demonstrated the importance of extracting high temporally resolved records for paleoclimate studies[citation needed] and, along with her husband and research partner, Lonnie Thompson, she pioneered the study of dust (particulate matter) in polar ice cores as a way to examine Earth's climate history.
The various chemical constituents are either deposited directly on the glacier surface or within the snow that falls and are eventually compacted into ice where they may be preserved over many millennia.
[2] Because the ice contained in some of these cores extend back hundreds of millennia, Mosley-Thompson, Thompson and their team are able to reconstruct parts of Earth's complex climate history.
[4] Her most recent expedition was the 6-person ice core drilling project on the Antarctic Peninsula's Bruce Plateau, for which she was field leader and Principal Investigator.
[7][6] In 2010, The Guardian described Mosley-Thompson and her husband Lonnie Thompson two of the “world's most respected climatologists and glaciologists.”[5] The Franklin Institute describes the team as being “widely recognized as the world's preeminent experts in ice core sampling.”[3] In addition to her research, Mosley-Thompson has served as president of AGU’s Atmospheric Sciences and Global Environmental Change Sections; chair of the AGU’s Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology and GEC Sections’ Fellows Committees; chair of the Geology and Geography section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; and as a member of the National Academy of Sciences’ U.S. National Committee for Quaternary Research and the Polar Research Board.