[1][2] She has made numerous important discoveries with regard to subglacial lakes and ice sheet dynamics, and has a ridge, called Bell Buttress, in Antarctica named after her.

[1][5] Bell is a passionate sailor: with her husband and two children, she has sailed across the Atlantic several times, as well as the coasts of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia and the Labrador Sea.

Since 1989, she has led research at Columbia University's Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO) on ice sheets, tectonics, rivers and mid-ocean ridges.

[27] Together with LDEO Polar Geophysics engineers, Bell developed IcePod,[28] a bracket-mounted instrumentation suite that can be flown by LC130 aircraft operated in Greenland and Antarctica.

The team defined crucial habitats and contaminated deposits and also discovered dozens of sunken ships and artifacts dating back to the Revolutionary War.