Jean Mary Grove

Jean Grove (née Clark; 10 March 1927 – 17 January 2001) was a British physical geographer and glaciologist known for her comprehensive study of climate change in the Little Ice Age across the world.

Born Jean Mary Clark to Mary Johnson Clark, one of the first women chemists at Cambridge University, she grew up with a keen interest in science in a family that enjoyed mountaineering. Jean Grove had tubercolosis as a child and for a year lived in a summer house in the garden. There she read widely, including books on exploration, geology and astronomy, and was taught by her mother. During the War the family moved to St Asaph, North Wales. Jean Grove attended Howell's School, Denbigh, where Marjorie Sweeting, later a Professor in the Geography Department at Oxford, was teaching. Marjorie Sweeting was a major influence and Jean decided to read geography at her mother's former College, Newnham.

She attended Newnham College and earned a degree in geography in 1948, then earned her Ph.D. in glaciology from Bedford College in 1956. She married Alfred Thomas Grove in 1954, while working on her doctorate and working as a part-time lecturer, and had six children, the first, historian Richard Grove, in 1955 and the last in 1971.

She much enjoyed a Long Vacation field trip to the Jotunheim mountains of Norway in 1947, led by W. Vaughan Lewis, Gordon Manley and Ronald Peel. Professor Frank Debenham, and Dr Jean Mitchell provided much encouragement and in the next three years Jean herself led small parties of students to Norway. Subsequently, she joined several University glaciological expeditions. 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. Grove examined the banding on and in Veslskautbreen and Veslgjuvbreen and gained her PhD in 1956 for this work – 'A study of aspects of the physiography of certain glaciers in Norway'. She produced two chapters in the 'Investigations on Norwegian Cirque Glaciers' (Royal Geographical Society Research Series: number 4, 1960) edited by Lewis, which brought together this innovative work, and published three other papers on the nature of these glaciers.

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