Gina E. Moseley (born 1984) is a British geologist, paleoclimatologist, and polar explorer. She is a professor of palaeoclimatology at the University of Innsbruck, where she leads the Greenland Caves Project. Moseley is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and a member of the Young Austrian Academy of Sciences.
She specializes in reconstructing the Earth's climate history by analyzing speleothem samples collected from remote cave systems. Her research in the High Arctic has extended local climate records back up to 10 million years, significantly surpassing the 128,000-year temporal limit of traditional ice core data.
Moseley was born in 1984 in Walsall, United Kingdom. She developed an interest in caving at the age of 12 during a family holiday in Somerset.
She completed undergraduate studies in physical geography at the University of Birmingham. She subsequently earned her Ph.D. from the University of Bristol in 2009; her doctoral thesis was titled Quaternary sea-level change in the circum-Caribbean region. Moseley later completed her Habilitation in Earth Sciences at the University of Innsbruck with a thesis titled Improving Understanding of Rapid Climate Change Events and Past Warm Periods in the Quaternary.
Following post-doctoral research dating meteorites at the University of Manchester, Moseley relocated to the University of Innsbruck in 2011 to focus on speleothem-based paleoclimate reconstructions. In 2015, she became an Austrian Science Fund (FWF) Hertha Firnberg Fellow. She went on to establish the world's first Arctic speleothem research group at the university.
Moseley's methodology utilizes uranium-thorium dating and stable isotope analysis on cave mineral deposits to construct high-resolution climate records. Her research extends beyond the Arctic, encompassing studies on the paleohydrology of southwest Nevada at Devils Hole, millennial-scale climate variability in the northern Alps (the NALPS19 record), permafrost variability in the British Isles during the Younger Dryas, and the dating of Late Palaeolithic cave art and permafrost in the Ural Mountains.
Moseley is the founder and expedition lead of the Greenland Caves Project. The initiative was inspired by a 1960 geological report authored by the United States Geological Survey and records from a U.S. military expedition, which documented the existence of unmapped caves at extreme northern latitudes.
Because speleothems only form when the local climate is temperate enough to support flowing liquid water, extracting samples from regions currently covered by permafrost provides direct evidence of past interglacial warm periods. Moseley's extraction of ancient speleothem calcite has demonstrated that Greenland experienced significantly milder climates millions of years ago, providing baseline data used to model modern global warming impacts.
Moseley engages in science communication regarding paleoclimatology and polar exploration. She is the main protagonist in the 2020 giant-screen documentary film <nowiki></nowiki>Ancient Caves<nowiki></nowiki>, produced by MacGillivray Freeman. Moseley has also appeared as a guest on science and exploration podcasts, including Alie Ward<nowiki>'s Ologies and Alex Honnold's Planet Visionaries</nowiki>.
Her fieldwork has been featured in National Geographic.
Moseley has received international funding and recognition for her research.
She is a National Geographic Explorer and also the member of the following scientific organizations: