[2][3] She much enjoyed a Long Vacation field trip to the Jotunheim mountains of Norway, led by William Vaughan Lewis, Gordon Manley and Ronald Peel[4] in 1947.
The aim of the first of these in 1951, organised by Lewis and John McCall, an American research student, was for undergraduate labour to excavate a tunnel into Vesl-Skautbreen, a cirque glacier, to investigate its structure and flow characteristics.
The effort was successful in reaching the headwall of the glacier and thereby provided graduates in geography, geology and mineralogy with the opportunity to make observations which laid the basis for post-war British glaciological research.
In a later retrospective account of their college days, some of the former students whom she had taught during her first decade at Girton wrote of her "[a]t a time in the early 1960s, when opportunities for most women beyond Cambridge were still limited, Jean Grove was our role model for a successful woman, showing that you could combine a professional life with marriage and young children".
[6] Jean Grove's research continued to involve glaciers but increasingly it turned towards a subject, then somewhat neglected, namely historical climatology, following in the footsteps of Gordon Manley and Hubert Lamb.
She and Arthur Battagel, a relation by marriage, made use of the information about climatic and glacial damage to farmland in Norway provided by land tax records.
[10] It has been supported by celebrities, politicians, and artists including Stephen Fry, Julian Fellowes, Jeffrey Archer, Tamsin Grieg, Clive James, Rowan Williams, and Lech Wałęsa.