By Peggy Helman
Medill News Service, Oct. 31, 2024
Under vast Wisconsin skies, a group of the world’s foremost climate scientists, researchers and advocates excitedly took their seats.
They gathered for the two-day long Comer Climate Conference, hosted annually in southwestern Wisconsin by the Comer Science and Education Foundation, to share their latest research. For many of the scientists who presented their latest findings on oceans, sea level rise and melting ice, the key to finding the solutions to the climate crisis now and in the future lies in clues from thousands of years in Earth’s past.
Teens Take on Climate, a Chicago-based educational and outreach program, is focused on the future from the start.
“Young people are the key,” said Richard Alley, a prominent Penn State glaciologist and one of the conference’s long-time organizers and moderators.
Teens Take on Climate (TTOC) connects diverse teens with climate education, employment and opportunities to succeed on inclusive, multidisciplinary climate pathways. The organization, which was nominated for a Climate Action Hero Award, is fighting the climate crisis locally – raising climate literacy, expanding climate education and accelerating climate careers and employment. Most of TTOC’s members are still in high school. Members develop climate action projects that involve and impact diverse sectors of society including their own communities, said Marji Hess, founding director of TTOC.
“What we desperately need is a few people – bright, young, ‘I’m gonna do it’ – who come, and they’re the engineers who build this. And we need a few more of them who come, and they’re the scientists who discover what the engineers need to build this,” Alley said.
The Comer Climate Conference also featured bright, young scientists doing just that.
Gracelyn McClure, 23, a junior scientist at Alkali Earth, presented research on correlations between meltwater, global temperature, and sea-level rise.
McClure uses a high-resolution record of two Iberian speleothems, spiky mineral deposits that hang from the ceiling of caves and formed as mineral-rich water seeps in. She assessed the regional impacts of meltwater intrusion, which is when melted water from glaciers percolates deep into the ground. McClure found correlations between meltwater intrusions, regional temperatures and sea-level changes.
Pairing the speleothem studies with other marine records, McClure explained possible relationships between meltwater and changes in the North Atlantic’s overturning circulation, which is part of a system of ocean currents that circulate water in the Atlantic. This system brings warm water north where it sinks and wells up cold water that the currents carry south, keeping climates more temperate in countries of the North Atlantic.
Figuring out the correlations between meltwater and ocean circulation might improve scientific understanding of how ice melt in the twenty-first century, as it accelerates, could impact ocean circulation and global temperature in the near future.
The conference’s youngest researcher, Robert Holzman, 21, is still an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities. But, Holzman doesn’t let homework get in the way of his research.
Holzman researched oxygen isotope signatures in the Gulf of Mexico, where sea water mixed with melted ice water from the Laurentide Ice Sheet – which covered millions of square miles including most of Canada and the Northern United States – during the height of the last great ice age approximately 18,500 years ago. When this freshwater ice melt ran down the Mississippi River and mixed with ocean water in the Gulf of Mexico, it spurred an event known as a meltwater pulse, a period of rapid post-glacial sea-level rise.
Understanding how the Laurentide Ice Sheet melting contributed to meltwater pulse can help scientists better predict how modern-day ice melt might affect sea-level rise on a global scale. Still, much is unknown.
“It sort of opens up the potential. It makes it clear that we are not entirely sure how past meltwater pulses have worked,” Holzman said. “We still have a ton to figure out as far as how modern ice melt is going to impact sea levels.”
A need for more science means a need for more scientists. Both McClure and Holzman agreed that engaging with climate change in their teens was a formative experience that inspired them to become climate professionals as young adults.
“I think if anything, the most significant impact is that it gives that initial exposure. It will get people interested and involved in climate for decades after,” Holzman said.
Photo at top: Participants joined together for two days of sessions where they shared their latest research and learned about new findings by colleagues.
