School of Earth and Climate Sciences

The ice core drilling camp at 13,000 feet on Alaska’s Mount Hunter, where 18 feet of snow falls each year, up from eight feet before the Industrial Revolution. (Erich Osterberg) Read full article from the Washington Post

The Russian Mineralogical Society has elected Research Professor Edward S. Grew as an Foreign Honorary Member.  He joins Peter Wyllie (Cal Tech), Peter Burns (Notre Dame) and Robert Hazen (Carnegie Institution) as the 4th current Foreign Honorary Member in the United States.  The election was held at the 200th Anniversary meeting of the Society in St. […]

The New York Times has highlighted the ongoing work, led by Alice and Joe Kelley, along with M.S. student Jacque Miller, to investigate the middens along the Maine coast at risk of erosion, with their archaeological significance potentially washed away. Additionally, Alice has provided an update for the ongoing Maine Sea Grant project .  With […]

(cover illustration published with permission of the Mineralogical Society of America) Ed Grew is the guest editor of the August issue of Elements, an international magazine of mineralogy, geochemistry and petrology, published jointly by 17 societies https://umaine.edu/news/along-the-mall/. As guest editor, Ed wrote the lead paper to introduce the six peer-reviewed articles by researchers from England, Turkey, Japan, New […]

Alice and Joe Kelley, along with graduate student Jacque Miller, are featured in a new UMaine News article describing their efforts to assess and preserve archaeological sites threatened by erosion. The researchers work with the Maine Historic Preservation Commission on a Maine Sea Grant funded project to use ground-penetrating radar to characterize the size and […]

Sean Smith, Peter Koons, and several undergraduate students are featured in the video documenting the ERS200 trip down the Penobscot River in Fall 2016.

Andy Reeve’s ongoing collaboration with Kristin Wilson-Grimes (Ph.D. UMaine, 2013) and her students, as they study the salt marshes of St. Croix, Virgin Islands, is featured in the Virgin Islands EPSCoR publication this month.

A new paper by Aaron Putnam, co-authored with Wally Broeker of Columbia University, has garnered attention from several media outlets.  The paper explores how rainfall patterns will respond to changing climate, using past climate change as a guide. The paper at Science Advances (a top feature on their website): http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/3/5/e1600871 Related articles UMaine press release […]

Laura Hartman was awarded a prize for her presentation “Frozen Volcano: Quantitatively Sourcing Ice Core Tephra” at the 2017 UMaine Student Symposium. Laura is an M.S. student in the Climate Change Institute, working with Andrei Kurbatov and Alicia Cruz-Uribe of SECS. Laura’s project relates to tephrachronology, as she explains: “Paleoclimate reconstructions from ice cores rely […]

Ed Grew and co-authors Robert Hazen, Marcus Origlieri and Robert Downs have published a study cataloging 208 minerals tied to human activities and consider how minerals do and will appear in the stratigraphic record of this time period, one many now call the Anthropocene. The article is published in American Mineralogist. Over 60 news organizations […]

Article by Buscombe, Grams and Smith highlighting work in the Penobscot River selected as 2017 Best Technical Note by the editor of the Journal of Hydraulic Engineering. The research focused on the use of low cost side-scan sonor to detect bottom surface textures in rivers. The work was led by Dan Buscombe at the USGS […]

Research in Cromwell Brook watershed in Acadia National Park by the Watershed Process and Sustainability Research Group led by Sean Smith is described in an online edition of U Maine Today magazine. The watershed research involves work by Brett Gerard (PhD student), Sam Roy (post doctoral researcher), and multiple undergraduate research assistants.

Article in U Maine Today highlights research in Acadia National Park led by Sean Smith, Steve Norton and collaborating U Maine faculty. Several students are included in the article and companion videos showing sampling activities in the park.

A Trek to the Giant Mongolian Glacier That Holds the Secrets to Global Warming Deep in the Altai mountains, American scholars are using drones to study glacier-formed ridges that could unlock the mysteries of abrupt climate change Click here to view Pacific Standard video

Click here to read article from Medill Reports Chicago

Research team uses Storms in Wells Maine to gain Insight on Rainfall and Water Quality Patterns: Wells, ME – Researchers and students from NH and ME collected storm data in Wells Maine to gain insight on how rainfall moves concentrations of pollutants in rural and urban streams. They are monitoring how pollutants and bacteria travel […]

Kimberley Miner, Ph.D. student, is studying pollutants currently trapped in glaciers to develop a climate resilience policy. See the video from WABI TV here.

Kat Allen, new faculty at the School of Earth and Climate Sciences, studies fossils in ocean sediments to determine past ocean conditions with implications for past ocean-climate interactions. Read the full story at UMaine News.

Ph.D. student Andrew Newcomb is studying dams along the Penobscot River to inform decision making. Read the full story at the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions here.

Gordon Bromley led the team that discovered a sample from East Antarctica that contains the highest concentration of helium-3 (a variety of helium formed from cosmogenic radiation) ever recorded in a terrestrial sample. Gordon’s full story is on the cosmognosis blog.