Graduate Student’s Research Included in Greenland Project
University of Maine Ph.D. candidate Aaron Putnam is a member of an international team of scientists who have produced a prediction of what climate records from Greenland might look like over the last 800,000 years and investigation into the possible causes of abrupt climate change.
Putnam, a glacial geologist in UMaine’s Department of Earth Sciences and Climate Change Institute, contributed research to a paper posted Sept. 8 on the website of the journal Science. The paper will be published in an upcoming issue of Science.
Stephen Barker of Cardiff University in Wales, U.K., led the research team.
An announcement from Cardiff University about the publication said the research demonstrates that abrupt climate change has been a systemic feature of Earth’s climate for hundreds of thousands of years and may play an active role in longer-term climate variability through its influence on ice age terminations.
The Greenland conditions – temperature records of which go back only approximately 100,000 years – were reconstructed by utilizing ice core temperature records retrieved from Antarctica. The researchers used a mathematical formulation to extend the Greenland record. The new predictions provide an extended testing bed for climate models that are used to predict future climate variability.
The research was funded by the Leverhulme Trust and Natural Environment Research Council in the U.K., and the National Science Foundation in the U.S.
Putnam is a Chapman native who has a master’s degree from UMaine.
Contact: Aaron Putnam, aaron.putnam@umit.maine.edu; Jessica Bloch, (207) 581-3777 or jessica.bloch@umit.maine.edu