Climate Change Institute

University of Maine anthropologist Kristin Sobolik argues that you are what you eat — and what your ancestors ate, and what their ancestors ate, and so on, for millennia. For that reason, today’s human diet is in a sad state of affairs and, quite frankly, our bodies weren’t designed for this. Problem is, it could […]

The snow-free landscape of Allan Hills has been a scientific destination for decades. Explorers have made the hour-long plane ride from McMurdo Station, the primary base of U.S. operations in Antarctica, to look for evidence of prehistoric and extraterrestrial remains in the form of dinosaur bones and meteorites. Paleoclimate scientist Andrei Kurbatov comes for some […]

Discovery of a nanodiamond-rich layer in the Greenland ice sheet  Andrei V. KURBATOV, Paul A. MAYEWSKI, Jorgen P. STEFFENSEN, Allen WEST, Douglas J. KENNETT, James P. KENNETT, Ted E. BUNCH, Mike HANDLEY, Douglas S. INTRONE, Shane S. QUE HEE, Christopher MERCER, Marilee SELLERS, Feng SHEN, Sharon B. SNEED, James C.WEAVER, James H. WITTKE, Thomas W. […]

When the oceanic phenomenon El Niño strikes every four to seven years, it wreaks havoc on the world’s weather patterns, fishing and agriculture. University of Maine anthropologist Dan Sandweiss wants to know how ancient civilizations coped with these blows to their way of life.  For the past five years, Sandweiss has been collaborating with researchers […]

Water, sometimes plentiful, other times scarce, is a vital resource to humans and the environment, but finding a balance that keeps the needs of both fulfilled is complicated, especially when combined with climate change concerns. A University of Maine research team studying how shifting climate conditions are affecting water supplies in Maine also is looking […]

Rapid warming and consequent ice-shelf collapse have focused attention on the glacial record of the Antarctic Peninsula. Here, we present the first record of terrestrial organic material exposed by recently retreating ice that bears on past glacier extent and climate in this sensitive region. Radiocarbon dates show that ice on Anvers Island was at or […]

A major puzzle of paleoclimatology is why, after a long interval of cooling climate, each late Quaternary ice age ended with a relatively short warming leg called a termination.We here offer a comprehensive hypothesis of how Earth emerged from the last global iceage. A prerequisite was the growth of very large Northern Hemisphere ice sheets, […]

Prof. Paul Mayewski, director of the University of Maine Climate Change Institute, will travel to Norway this weekend to join an exclusive fraternity of esteemed climate scientists to receive the International Glaciological Society’s (IGS) Seligman Crystal. Since the award was first presented in 1963 — to its namesake, the late British glaciologist Gerald Seligman — […]

University of UMaine anthropologist Brian Robinson and colleagues are looking at archaeological evidence of Atlantic salmon to better understand the effects of global warming.   UMaine News Link

A new paper in the March issue of the journal Nature Geoscience describes the first direct evidence of warm subtropical waters circulating deep inside glacial fjords in Greenland. These source waters are carried north by the Gulf Stream to the subpolar gyre in the Irminger Sea off Greenland’s east coast. Until now, it was unclear […]