A recent expedition to Chile by Paul Mayewski, director of UMaine’s Climate Change Institute, and a team of other UMaine scientists, was featured in the Bangor Daily News. The article noted the group drilled ice cores in a crater inside an active volcano. Mayewski told the BDN the region is important because the glaciers there are one of the primary water sources for the growing city of Santiago. Andrei Kurbatov, an assistant research professor who was on the trip, said ice core samples can even reveal a picture of how changes humans have made in just the past few decades have affected contaminants in the atmosphere.

Contact: Jessica Bloch, tel: (207) 581-3777

Gordon Hamilton, an associate professor in UMaine’s Climate Change Institute, was quoted in a Boston Herald story about the possible reasons behind the region’s unseasonably warm weather. Hamilton said although climatic phenomenon are partly to blame for the current jet stream trajectory and warm air flow, the bigger cause of the current weather pattern is coming from the long-term decline of the Arctic sea ice.

Contact: Jessica Bloch, (207) 581-3777

The website Adventures in Climate Change is running all of the blog entries about a team of scientists from the University of Maine’s Climate Change Institute who are on an expedition in the Tupungatito Glacier, located in a volcanic crater at an elevation of 19,000 feet in the Andes Mountains in Chile. Paul Mayewski, director of the Climate Change Institute and Bjorn Grigholm, a Ph.D. student in Earth Science at UMaine, have been sending back blog entries via satellite phone from the field. The researchers are drilling ice cores, which they will bring back to UMaine. Adventures in Climate Change, which is a recommended blog on the Discovery Channel website, highlights the work being done by scientists, activists and anyone involved in climate change research as knowledge gatherers, observers or innovators.