EAR-PF: Developing early Holocene records of terrestrial climate in Baffin Bay to understand ice sheet response time to climate change

Thomas Elizabeth K, Buffalo NY

Investigators

Abstract

Dr. Elizabeth K. Thomas has been awarded an NSF Earth Sciences Postdoctoral Fellowship to conduct research and outreach at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and the State University of New York at Buffalo. She will reconstruct climate change of the early Holocene (7-10 thousand years ago) on western Greenland and eastern Baffin Island to better constrain the factors that control ice sheet margin change. Understanding the speed and nature of ice sheet response to climate change is at the forefront of the scientific community and public interest, as this is a major uncertainty of state-of-the-art sea level rise predictions. Dr. Thomas' research will place constraints on the speed and nature of ice sheet response to climate change on human-relevant timescales, with direct benefits to communities working to adapt to sea level rise. Dr. Thomas will broaden participation in Earth Sciences by mentoring undergraduate researchers and developing outreach programs in Amherst, MA and Buffalo, NY, communities with significant populations that are underrepresented in Earth Science. Both of these communities lie near features deposited by the Laurentide Ice Sheet thousands of years ago, and thus provide natural laboratories for learning about ice sheets and discussing challenges that scientists and society face today regarding climate change, ice sheets, and sea level rise. Quantifying ice sheet responses to climate change is critical for predicting sea level rise in a warming world. During the early Holocene, the Baffin Bay sectors of the Laurentide and Greenland ice sheets advanced rapidly and dramatically, likely in response to abrupt (10s to 100s of years) climate changes at 9.3 and 8.2 ka. The character of early Holocene decadal-scale temperature and precipitation changes in the Baffin Bay region remains unknown, however, so direct comparison of climate and ice sheet reconstructions currently is not possible. Dr. Thomas will use organic compounds (branched glycerol dialkyl glycerol tetraethers and leaf wax hydrogen isotopes) preserved in lake sediments near the margins of the Greenland and Laurentide ice sheets to reconstruct decadal-scale temperature and precipitation changes. She will then compare the climate reconstructions to ice sheet reconstructions to elucidate ice sheet response time to climate change.