Climate Change Institute

The processes that led to glaciation at the cratered poles of Mercury, the planet closest to the sun, have been modeled by a University of Maine-led research team. James Fastook, a UMaine professor of computer science and Climate Change Institute researcher, and James Head and Ariel Deutsch of Brown University, studied the accumulation and flow […]

536 AD was an exceedingly bad year for humanity, perhaps even “the worst year to be alive”. A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night — for 18 months. “For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year,” wrote […]

The news this past year has been filled with stories about major scientific assessments on climate change on the global and national scales. These reports highlight evidence of our changing climate, the escalating costs and the increasing urgency to respond with dramatic reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions and investments in adaptation. Maine has been a leader […]

Several University of Maine faculty members and graduate students are representing UMaine at COP24, the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, in Katowice, Poland. They are engaging with world leaders who are negotiating global climate change policies. Follow their reports from the conference on their blog, which includes […]

Ellyn Enderlin, a University of Maine research assistant professor in the Climate Change Institute and the School of Earth and Climate Sciences, was quoted in the National Geographic article, “What Greenland’s ‘unprecedented’ ice loss means for Earth.” A new study published in the journal Nature found that the melting of the Greenland ice sheet is […]

K. R. Miner, K. J. Kreutz, S. Jain, S. Campbell, and A. Liljedahl Received: 12 April 2018 / Revised: 11 October 2018 / Accepted: 29 October 2018 © Springer Nature America, Inc. 2018   ABSTRACT Widespread distribution of atmospherically mobilized organochlorine pollutants (OCPs) has been documented throughout the Arctic. A fraction of these OCPs have […]

LAST PREPARATIONS in ANTARCTICA UNEXPLORED DOME FUJI This Saturday, December 1, commences the scientific and exploration expedition ‘Antarctica Unexplored DOME FUJI 2018-2019’ with the WindSled, the polar eco-vehicle that will travel 2,000 kilometers in the interior of the Antarctic plateau to develop 10 research projects and reach one of the most inhospitable and unknown areas […]

Children in Alaska whose diet includes a lot of fish from rivers fed by the Eastern Alaska Mountain Range may have a long-term elevated risk for cancer because of insecticides — including DDT — in the meltwater. Even with low levels of organochlorine pollutants (OCPs) in glacial meltwater, the risk of cancer for youth and […]

Kimberley Miner, a research assistant professor at the University of Maine Climate Change Institute, spoke about her glacier research on Radio Ecoshock. Miner discussed her discovery of persistent organic pollutants (POPs) in the downstream water of the Silvretta Glacier in the Swiss Alps, and the potential for resulting health risks in an area where wind […]

Hometown: Auburn, Maine Emily Blackwood, a quaternary and climate studies master’s student, received her bachelor’s degree in anthropology from UMaine in 2015. This past summer she traveled to Peru to excavate and gather information from an archaeological site with UMaine faculty members Daniel Sandweiss, Alice Kelley and Paul “Jim” Roscoe, as well as Bangor attorney […]