Putnam’s expedition featured in Pacific Standard Magazine, Warm Regards Podcast
Aaron Putnam was featured in a Warm Regards Podcast about his recent research expedition in Mongolia. The assistant professor with the University of Maine Climate Change Institute searched for clues in the Altai Mountains about what caused the Earth to lurch out of the last ice age about 20,000 years ago. Warm Regards is a podcast about the warming planet. Jacquelyn Gill, a paleoecologist at UMaine, is a co-host for some of the podcasts. Putnam’s expedition also was detailed in a companion piece to the podcast that appeared in Pacific Standard Magazine. According to the feature, Putnam used drones to study glacier-formed ridges and he collected the surface layer of granite boulders on moraines along the border of Mongolia, China and Russia to learn about climate change of the past. “This (the end of the last ice age) was the singular most powerful, most important climate event in human history. It allowed us to flourish,” Putnam says in the article. “But we don’t know why that happened.” Determining what caused the ice age’s demise could help Putnam identify the triggers that cause abrupt climate change.