Climate Change Institute

The Bangor Daily News interviewed Sean Birkel, University of Maine research assistant professor and Maine’s state climatologist, about signs of a warming climate in Maine. “The warming climate brings changes in atmospheric circulation that make extreme events — such as intense short-term drought and wind storms with heavy rainfall — more likely,” said Birkel.

Paul Mayewski, director of the Climate Change Institute, took part in a ScienceWhys podcast with host Lisa Heldke, director of the Nobel Conference at Gustavus Adolphus College. The podcast poses questions at the confluence of science and ethics. Mayewski says that everybody wants to be healthy. If we had clean air and clean water, he […]

Growing up alongside the Niagara River in New York, Karl Kreutz loved the winter storms that dumped feet of snow and he enjoyed watching ice from Lake Erie flow past his house en route to Niagara Falls.   “I didn’t know it at the time, but it really was like an Arctic landscape right in […]

Two University of Maine undergraduates are designing place-based education materials and K–12 curricula about the Grand Kankakee Marsh in Northern Indiana as part of a National Geographic Society grant. Mo Weitman and Bell Gellis Morais are working with Katherine Glover, research associate at the Climate Change Institute (CCI) and recipient of a National Geographic Society […]

“Forever chemicals” used in water-repellant outdoor gear have been found in snow from the top of Mount Everest. Kimberley Miner says these human-made per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) — which have been linked to birth defects, high cholesterol and increased risk of kidney and testicular cancer — could eventually pose a risk for trekkers, climbers […]

Paul Mayewski and Mariusz Potocki are included in the Eos story “An Ice Core from the Roof of the World” about the 2019 National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Everest Expedition. Mayewski, director of the Climate Change Institute, was the expedition leader and lead scientist. Potocki, a Ph.D. candidate, collected the highest ice core in […]

The Bangor Daily News, Eurekalert and Phys.org picked up a University of Maine news release about a collaborative study which concluded that 447 species of trees and shrubs are growing in less than 50% of their suitable North American ranges. The study, which was published in the Journal of Biogeography, suggests that soils, other plants […]

Forecasts predicting where plants and animals will inhabit over time rely primarily on information about their current climate associations, but that only plays a partial role. Under climate change, there’s a growing interest in assessing whether trees and other species can keep pace with changing temperatures and rainfall, shifting where they are found, also known […]

An innovative National Geographic expedition collected the world’s highest ice core from Mount Everest. Mariusz Potocki (center with orange goggles) and the National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Everest Expedition team collect the highest ever recorded ice core sample at the South Col Glacier. Credit: Dirk Collins, National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Everest Expedition, […]

The Bangor Daily News talked with Cindy Isenhour, a University of Maine associate professor of anthropology, about recycling wrapping paper and repurposing other materials to wrap gifts.