Climate Change Institute

Illustration by Amanda Kahl Extinct North American species and those that exist today are juxtaposed near the North and South Bubble mountains in Acadia National Park. Clockwise from top left: a musk ox, short-faced bear, woodland caribou, American lion, giant beaver and woolly mammoth, with today’s moose. At the end of the last Ice Age, […]

Kimberley Rain Miner is an IGERT fellow and PhD student at CCI/Earth Sciences where she is studying legacy pollutants in glaciers, and the risk they pose to downstream communities. She has recently become a new Research Fellow at the Center for Climate and Security, where she focuses on utilizing scenario planning and risk assessment for […]

Cindy Isenhour, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Maine and a cooperating faculty with the Climate Change Institute, was a recent guest on The Takeaway, a national news radio program. Isenhour spoke about carbon emissions and how the average person can calculate and cut their carbon footprint. City dwellers consume a lot […]

An article featuring the Ice Age Trail Map Downeast Map & Guide was published in the Machias Valley News Observer on Dec. 2, 2015. MachiasValleyObs_12-2-2015_-_Ice_Age_Trail_Map.pdf  

Colle Gnifetti. Photo by Nicole Spaulding In 2013 a joint venture of the University of Maine and Harvard University retrieved a 73-meter (240ft) ice core from Colle Gnifetti in the Swiss Alps.  Chemical analysis of the ice core, at the Climate Change Institute, is producing invaluable new data about climate change and human-climate interactions from […]

Peter Neill’s The Once and Future Ocean aspires to do nothing less than transform our relationship with the world’s most promising and imperiled natural element: the ocean and the inter-connected cycles of water, essential for all aspects of human survival in the 21st century. A successor to the work of Rachael Carson, Aldo Leopold, and Jonathan […]

Paul Smiths, N.Y. — IT’S a mistake to think the climatic effects of our carbon emissions will be over within a few decades or centuries. Our intergenerational responsibilities run much deeper into the future. In this new Anthropocene epoch, the “Age of Humans,” we have become so numerous, our technology so powerful, and our lives […]

  University of Maine researchers traced a portion of a route in the Southern Ocean made famous by polar explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, whose 1914–1916 South Pole expedition aboard Endurance has been called one of the greatest survival stories of all time. Paul Mayewski, director of the Climate Change Institute, led a team to recover […]