Climate Change Institute

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 […]

A team of world-renowned researchers, including University of Maine Climate Change Institute Director Paul Mayewski, has released a report addressing several urgent questions about Antarctica. The continent is said to hold answers to many of the questions scientists have about what climate change means for the Earth. The findings of Mayewski and 100 world-leading scientists […]

Polar glaciologist Gordon Hamilton, an associate research professor at the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute, studies ice sheets and their role in modulating global sea levels. He studies the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets both in the field and from space. As recently as this past summer, Hamilton was in Greenland, where he has […]

The rainforest that lines the Amazon River in southeast Peru is a tangle of lush green foliage, and to those who are unfamiliar with the region, it appears pristine. But the indigenous people who call this region home have left their mark on the landscape through agriculture, religious rites, hunting and gathering. Anthropologist Constanza Ocampo-Raeder […]

Changes in the velocity of large outlet glaciers and ice streams in Greenland and Antarctica are important for ice-sheet mass balance and hence sea level.  Mass loss in large parts of both ice sheets is being driven by the recent accelerations of outlet glaciers2–5 in response to unknown or poorly constrained climatic or internal perturbations […]

This volume provides a comprehensive, up-to-date account of how the physical and biological environment of the Antarctic continent and Southern Ocean has changed from Deep Time until the present day. It also considers how the Antarctic environment 05 change over the next century in a world where greenhouse gas concentrations are much higher than occurred […]

Some of the most dramatic evidence of climate change today is found in the planet’s lakes and reservoirs, according to three researchers from Miami University, the University of Maine and University of Alberta – Edmonton, writing in a February issue of Science magazine. These inland waters that are important regulators in the global carbon cycle […]