Research conducted by UMass Amherst Geosciences graduate student Evan Thaler, along with professors Isaac Larsen and Qian Yu, developed a method using satellite imagery to map areas in agricultural fields in the Corn Belt of the Midwestern U.S. that have no remaining A-horizon soil. Read the UMass news release and see the journal article for more information.

A study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Francois Lapointe, Raymond Bradley and colleagues documents how Atlantic sea-surface temperatures in the recent decade are warmest as compared to their estimates spanning the past 3,000 years. Read the press release here.

Rob DeConto and teams from Columbia, Penn State and the University at Buffalo will receive $3 million in research funds and $4 million for field operations to drill through the Greenland Ice Sheet and into the bedrock below, where they will be able to evaluate how long it has been since the last ice sheet retreated from the continent. Read the news release here.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has released a report on coastal flooding in the U.S. caused by rising seas due to the warming climate. The CSRC’s Rob DeConto commented in an article in the Boston Globe on high tide flooding and the report. “This problem isn’t going away …. the combination of ongoing sea-level rise and increasing tidal range in the 2030s will conspire to really increase the number of these nuisance flood events.”

An article in Inside Climate News includes quotes by Ambarish Karmalkar. ““If you look at the spatial pattern of warming, then what you find is that you see much higher warming in the coastal areas in New England,” he says. Click here to read the article.

Julie Brigham-Grette recently appeared on the NOVA special Polar Extremes, which takes viewers on an epic adventure through time at the polar extremes of our planet. In the episode Professor Brigham-Grette described her research on past climates drawn from long sediment cores from Lake El’gygytgyn in NE Russia. The interval from 1:03:18 to 1:08:00 focuses on this research. The 2 hour special premiered February 5, 2020. See it here.

Julie Brigham-Grette was interviewed by Live Science on her role in the construction of the Yukon Geological Survey’s new map of Beringia, ca. 18,000 years ago. Read more…