Climate Change Institute

Catherine West was a junior history major at Bryn Mawr when she jumped at the chance to be a field school student during a 1998 dig at a prehistoric Aleut site on Unalaska Island. As part of that summer adventure, she met welcoming locals, hiked lush green mountains, saw whales breach in the Bering Sea, […]

This study provides a baseline from which changes in the chemistry of the atmosphere over Antarctica can be monitored under expected warming scenarios and continued intensification of industrial activities in the Southern Hemisphere. It is the first study to measure more than 25 chemical constituents in the surface snow and firn across extensive regions of […]

Climate reconstructions developed from a West Antarctic deep ice core (Siple Dome) combined with Antarctic ice sheet reconstructions show that recent poleward migration of the Southern Hemisphere westerlies, coincident with greenhouse gas rise and the Antarctic ozone hop, has led to unprecedented penetration of air masses bringing warmth, extra-Antarctic source dust, and anthropogenic pollutants into […]

From an archaeological excavation site on the Peruvian coast, University of Maine interdisciplinary Ph.D. candidate Ana Mauricio participated in a Jan. 13 live chat with primatologist Jane Goodall and underwater explorer and discoverer of the Titanic Robert Ballard, among other explorers from seven continents, organized by the National Geographic Society to celebrate its 125th anniversary. […]

Amid the economic and environmental realities of fossil fuel dependence in the United States, regulatory processes need immediate reform to allow renewable energy initiatives such as offshore wind to provide alternatives, according to the University of Maine’s first School of Economics Visiting Professor of Energy Law and Policy. Indeed, argues Jeffrey Thaler, a nationally known […]

A team of scientists from nine nations led by Dr. Nancy Bertler Victoria University’s Antarctic Research Center and GNS Science (New Zealand), have made a huge breakthrough in Antarctica—successfully drilling more than 760m through the ice to the bedrock, on an island in the Ross Sea.  They completed the drilling in late December when the […]

UMaine Gets $3 Million NSF IGERT Award For An Adaptation To Abrupt Climate Change Program The need to adapt environmental policies and management strategies to meet the social and ecological challenges caused by abrupt climate change events around the world is the focus of a new graduate program at the University of Maine beginning this […]

Researchers with UMaine’s Climate Change Institute will be blogging while on a trip to South Georgia Island in the South Atlantic Ocean. The expedition members are Climate Change Institute Director Paul Mayewski, UMaine graduate students Bjorn Grigholm and Mariusz Potocki, UMaine postdoctoral researcher Dan Dixon, Chilean researchers Gino Casassa and Marcelo Arevalo, EMT medic Alex […]

View the YouTube film by Paul A. Mayewski in celebration of the 40th anniversary of the Climate Change Institute.  

Precipitation variability in the winter rainfall zone of South Africa during the last 1400 yr linked to the austral westerlies J. C. Stager1,2 , P. A. Mayewski2 , J. White1 , B. M. Chase3,4 , F. H. Neumann5,6 , M. E. Meadows7 , C. D. King1 , and D. A. Dixon2 1Natural Sciences, Paul Smith’s […]