Trevor Chinn rests beneath Mt Barff, near Mt Aspiring.

Chinn has spent most of his scientific career working on snow and ice in New Zealand and Antarctica. In the 1970s and 1980s he was responsible for compiling the New Zealand Glacier Inventory, documenting and mapping all the glaciers in New Zealand. The information has been used as the basis for defining glaciers on topographic maps.

The advance and retreat of glaciers is one of the most sensitive indicators of climate change. Trevor Chinn devised a simple method of recording the annual changes of a group of glaciers in late summer. This has been done each year since the 1970s, providing a useful record of glacier change.