Morris was among the first women scientists to work in Antarctica. Her research focused on accumulation and loss of ice and snow from the continent. This required measuring snowfall and ambient temperature. As a consequence, she went on several land crossings of the southern
Antarctic Peninsula and the
Filchner–Ronne Ice Shelf. As satellite mapping and measurement
remote sensing replaced human recording, her measurements were important to
ground truth satellite observations of the ice sheet. While she was head of the ice and climate division at the
British Antarctic Survey from 1986-1999 the importance of Antarctic research to understanding the
ozone hole and
climate change became apparent and she led development of research directions to meet this need. Morris was brought up in
Chiswick, near London. Her parents taught English, but while they were studying at
University of Bristol, they had become friends with
Cecil Powell, a physicist. She was inspired to study physics, and also to follow her interest in mountains. She studied physics as an undergraduate and for her Ph.D. (awarded 1972) at
University of Bristol modelled how ice flowed over mountains, supervised by
John Nye. After working briefly in X-ray crystallography at
University of Dundee, and then as a researcher at the
University of East Anglia with
Geoffrey Boulton, she joined the
Institute of Hydrology for 11 years from 1975. She enjoyed fieldwork and was able to carry it out in mountains in Scotland, Norway, Austria and Canada. However, until the late 1980s
only men were permitted at the UK station in Antarctica or distant arctic field sites. the two major scientific societies involved in her area of science. In 2015 she was awarded D.Sc. by University of Bristol. In 2020 the Antarctic Place-names Committee announced that a
glacier in Antarctica had been named after her. ==References==