By Emma Conkle Nov. 28, 2025 To an onlooker, it may have seemed like Tricia Hall Collins and her research partner, Katie Westbrook, were blasting into the surfaces of boulders in a rainy Norwegian field, but what they were actually doing could change the way we understand climate change. “That our glacier records are showing …
How drilling into Norwegian boulders reveals the story of climate change Read More »
By Jack Austin, Nov. 18, 2025 At Teens Take On Climate (TTOC), a Chicago-based environmental mentorship organization, youth climate activism doesn’t begin with lectures about melting glaciers — it starts with conversations about identity, creativity, and opportunity, and how young people’s passions connect to the future of the planet. “We make climate personal” is the …
As global temperatures climb and seas continue to rise, oceanographer Lynne Talley warns that the accelerating melt of Antarctic ice threatens to erase entire island nations within decades. From her decades of research in the Southern Ocean, Talley has traced how warming waters and shifting circulation patterns are destabilizing the planet’s climate system — and …
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By Ananya Chandhok Medill Reports, Feb. 20, 2024 How ocean currents circulate heat over thousands of miles is critical for University of Washington oceanographer Channing Prend to understand ice melt in Antarctica. Prend’s research on the West Antarctic ice sheet revealed that heat from water thousands of miles to the north can lead to ice …
By Louise Kim and Jessica Savage Medill Reports, Dec. 15, 2023 Gina Moseley scales mountains and explores remote lands all in the name of understanding how the climate has been changing across hundreds of thousands of years and how that impacts current accelerating change. “It’s really important to understand what the climate’s doing, what …
Crystal Rao, a geoscience graduate student at Princeton University, bases her research on the environmental changes and climate impacts on the species in clues from nitrogen isotopes in fossils.
Rao uses the ratio of two common forms of nitrogen as a standard, and compares it with the nitrogen inside the tooth of the megalodon shark. She has reconstructed a picture of when and where megalodon sharks topped the food chain in Arctic waters. Rao said this fierce predator could “basically eat anything in the ocean”.
Columbia University Ph.D. student Celeste Pallone devotes her research time observing Eastern Equatorial Pacific dwelling planktonic foraminifera – very tiny creatures that can give huge clues into the pace of ocean climate change.
“Marine sediment cores act as an archive of sea surface temperatures, past environments, including past temperatures, and general environmental factors, such as past global ice volume,” she said of the single-celled, shelled organisms she studies at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory high in the Palisades outside New York City. “I examine these proxies, which can be biological or chemical or physical, and then using them I reconstruct oceanographic conditions in the past helping craft record of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation [ENSO].”
Nearly 20 years ago, then Ph.D. student Gina Moseley walked into a bar in Bristol to meet fellow members of the University of Bristol Spelæological Society caving club. An older caver talked with her over drinks about some small caves in northeastern Greenland he’d always dreamed of organizing an expedition to explore. But, “logistically, it’s a nightmare to get out there,” said Moseley, now a professor in the Institute of Geology at the University of Innsbruck in Austria. The caver gave her all the papers he’d collected on the caves, and for years she kept them filed away.
What do Antarctic climate scientists and Nordic Vikings have in common?
More than you’d think.
After being cast out of Iceland for murdering his neighbor, Erik the Red, the notorious Viking who walked the Earth around 985 A.D., braved the unforgiving seas in search of a new home. That’s according to Christopher Klein’s History article “The Viking Explorer Who Beat Columbus to America.” Wrapped in layers of pelts, tools in hand, the Viking dropped anchor on new land. Gradually, he took control, founding the first European settlement in what is today Greenland.
An alpine forest turns into a desert within a mere 16,000 years – the geologic equivalent of a blink of an eye. The transformation is just one climate mystery waiting to be solved.
Wondering what drives local rainfall? Curious about tipping points for the entire global weather system? To find answers, you’ll have to go through the “lake mafia,” a disparate collection of scientists who study closed lake basins.
