Climate Change Institute

Comments from Brian Robinson of the UMaine anthropology story are included in a Monday Boston Globe story about research looking at the impact of climate change on prehistoric New England-area culture.  New data are available to scientists, allowing them to build on a 2005 report looking carefully at a 1,300 “mini ice age” reflecting significant […]

Comments from Gordon Hamilton, a professor in UMaine’s Climate Change Institute, are included in a front-page Sunday New York Times story detailing scientific research related to changes in Greenland’s glaciers.  The story says that Hamilton and others are working “to answer one of the most urgent – and most widely debated – questions facing humanity: […]

Nanotechwire.com reports on the discovery made by a group of scientists, including Andrei Kurbatov and Paul Mayewski of UMaine’s Climate Change Institute, of a layer of nanodiamonds in Greenland ice that 05 provide a link to the extension of certain mammals nearly 13,000 years ago. Kurbatov and Mayewski helped provide expertise related to the flow […]

An in-depth interview with Paul Mayewski, director of UMaine’s Climate Change Institute, and international expert on glaciology and climate change, was posted 10 . 8 on the Edible Geography website, a Los Angeles-based news-blog website. Mayewski discussed his ice core research in Greenland, the Himalayas and Tibetan plateau, Iceland, New Zealand and Antarctica, explaining the […]

Melting glaciers in the American West are releasing chemicals that cause ecosystem changes in alpine lakes, including large quantities of nitrogen that reduces biodiversity, according to an international research team led by University of Maine paleoecologist Jasmine Saros. The study, funded by a $509,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, determined that glaciers in alpine […]

An international science journal this week published a paper, authored by a UMaine Ph.D. candidate, which claims to resolve a long-standing debate about the end of the last ice age in New Zealand. Aaron Putnam, a glacial geologist in UMaine’s Department of Earth Sciences and Climate Change Institute, was the primary author of the paper […]

UMaine Climate Change Institute glaciologist Gordon Hamilton is featured in a Rolling Stone Magazine story about the accelerated melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.  Writer Ben Wallace-Wells spent time with Hamilton and his colleagues during an expedition to Greenland.  The story also makes reference to the work of Hamilton’s UMaine graduate student Leigh […]

Millennial-scale cold reversals in the high latitudes of both hemispheres interrupted the last transition from full glacial to interglacialclimate conditions. The presence of the Younger Dryas stadial (12.9 to 11.7 kyr ago) is established throughout muchof the Northern Hemisphere, but the global timing, nature and extent of the event are not well established. Evidence in […]

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 […]