Climate Change Institute

For tens of thousands of years, the warm, sticky natural asphalt that occasionally bubbled to the Earth’s surface in the area now called Los Angeles was a death sentence for some ice age animals. Woolly mammoths, camels, rabbits, horses, bison, sloths, rodents, snails, turtles, birds and saber-toothed cats perished after becoming mired in the liquid […]

The Herring Gut Learning Center, a nonprofit marine education center in Port Clyde, has selected University of Maine Ph.D. candidate Samuel Belknap as its next executive director. Belknap is currently pursuing a doctorate in anthropology and environmental policy through Adaptation to Abrupt Climate Change, a National Science Foundation IGERT fellowship program. A native of Midcoast […]

Mount Desert Islander reported the College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor will host a free screening of four films produced by The Island Institute at 6:30 p.m. Jan. 19. The future of fisheries and the changing ocean in the Gulf of Maine and elsewhere are explored in the films, according to the article. The […]

University of Maine climate scientist Gordon Hamilton was included in several media reports on notable Mainers who passed away in 2016. The Associated Press, Portland Press Herald and Maine Public reported on the deaths. The professor in the School of Earth and Climate Sciences and researcher with the Climate Change Institute died in a field […]

The Christian Science Monitor interviewed Paul Mayewski, director of the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute, for a story on the increase in Arctic Ocean shipping and the economic opportunities it presents for Maine. Rising temperatures in the Arctic, due to climate change, have led to a steady loss of summer sea ice, making waters […]

A CBS News 2016 review piece about the warming of the planet, including the dramatic transformation in the Arctic, quoted the director of the University of Maine Climate Change Institute “For the people in the Arctic, no one has to tell them an abrupt climate change has hit,” Paul Mayewski said in a recent interview […]

Jill Pelto’s watercolor “Decline in Glacier Mass Balance” is the cover art for the Mainebiz 2017 Book of Lists, published Dec. 26. Pelto is a graduate student in the School of Earth and Climate Sciences at the University of Maine, where she graduated in December 2015 with bachelor degrees in studio art and Earth science. […]

Yale Climate Connections published an article on Jill Pelto, a graduate student in the School of Earth and Climate Sciences at the University of Maine. Pelto creates environmental artwork as a way to communicate scientific data related to climate change. Pelto grew up immersed in nature and always loved to make art, according to the […]

Jacquelyn Gill, a professor of paleoecology at the University of Maine, was a recent guest on the syndicated weekly Radio Ecoshock Show. The episode, “Welcome to the dark new climate,” focused on how creatures fell into extinction during abrupt climate shifts, sometimes within a single human lifetime. Gill said abrupt climate change hit species before […]

Jessica Scheick, a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Earth and Climate Sciences and the Climate Change Institute at the University of Maine, was invited to give the keynote address at the 2016 Maine Robotics EXPO and First Lego League State Championships opening ceremony in Augusta on Dec. 10. During her opening remarks, Scheick, speaking […]