Climate Change Institute

For years, the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute has been collecting ice samples from all over the world. “These cylinders of ice that are extremely valuable for us to be able to understand how the climate changed,” said Professor Paul Mayewski, the Institute’s director. Now laser technology is revolutionizing that research. “What we’ve done […]

The Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine and PalEON are offering a short course on the science and theory of pollen analysis, including: Modern pollen sample collection & preparation Sediment coring for paleo-vegetation reconstruction Chemical processing, slide preparation & microscopy Pollen morphology & identification Data analysis with R, Tilia, & the Neotoma database […]

  A team of University of Maine scientists studying nearly 11,700-year-old ice cores from Greenland found that history is repeating. Paul Mayewski, director and distinguished professor of UMaine’s Climate Change Institute, says today’s climate situation in the Arctic is equivalent to, but more localized, than the warming during the Younger Dryas/Holocene shift about 11,700 years […]

Announcing the Human Dimensions of Climate Change Film Series sponsored by:  Anthropology, Native American Programs, Climate Change Institute and the Fogler Library. Please contact Cindy Isenhour for additional information. Cindy Isenhour, Assistant Professor, Graduate Coordinator Department of Anthropology, University of Maine 303.807.6515        

First ultra-high resolution view (hundreds of samples per year) of the abrupt (1 year) shift in atmospheric circulation that ushered in Holocene climate and demonstration that recent warming in the Arctic while less widely distributed is the most recent similar magnitude event since Holocene onset. Mayewski et al.(2013) Journal of Quaternary Science.

For reports on fatal overdoses in Maine, the Bangor Daily News and Portland Press Herald cited research by Marcella Sorg, a medical and forensic anthropologist in the University of Maine’s Department of Anthropology, Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center and the Climate Change Institute. Sorg has been tracking drug-related death patterns in Maine with Margaret Greenwald, […]

To female coastal plain swamp sparrows, male bill size matters. When looking for a mate outside of their pair bond, female coastal plain swamp sparrows (Melospiza georgiana nigrescens) choose males with large bills, according to a University of Maine-led study conducted along Delaware Bay. Small-billed males are more at risk of being cheated on by […]

The Christian Science Monitor cited data from the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute in the article “Global Warming? Public attitudes often at mercy of the weather, study finds.” The article stated when much of North America had unusually cold weather, other areas such as the West Coast of the United States, eastern Asia and […]

Paul Mayewski, a professor and director of the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute, spoke to NPR for a segment titled “Can’t stand the cold snap? Don’t go to Antarctica.” Mayewski was interviewed by phone from Kennedy Airport where he was on his way to Antarctica to study ice cores, columns of frozen water that […]

Kurt Rademaker (MS in Quaternary and Climate Studies 2006, IPhD in Quaternary Archaeology 2012) has won the Tübingen Prize for Ice Age Research (aka the Tübingen Research Prize in Early Prehistory and Quaternary Ecology). This major international prize is open to recent doctoral recipients (last 3 years) world-wide in a range of disciplines that includes […]