U Maine graduate (PhD 2020) is a Guest Editor of special issue of the in honor of the 80th birthday of Research Professor Edward Grew.

Research Professor Edward Grew has been honored with publication of a special issue of the prestigious journal Mineralogical Magazine in celebration of his 80th birthday in 2024. Cambridge University Press publishes the journal on behalf of the Mineralogical Society of the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Jesse Walters (U Maine PhD 2020) served as one of the Guest Editors for the issue, and also was one of the co-conveners of the special session in Grew’s honor at the 4th European Mineralogical Conference held August 19-23, 2024 at Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland: “The Testimony of the Minerals: A Celebration of Edward S. Grew at 80.”   The special issue includes 17 papers based on the presentations by international scientists at the Dublin meeting.

Walters received his PhD from the U Maine School of Earth and Climate Sciences in 2020 when he was honored as the Edith M. Patch Outstanding Ph.D. Student in the U Maine College of Natural Sciences, Forestry, and Agriculture.  Grew was a member of the faculty committee for Walters’ doctoral thesis chaired by Prof. Alicia Cruz Uribe . Walters received a Fulbright Fellowship and a post-doctoral research fellowship at the Goethe Universität in Germany. He is now Assistant Professor at the Universität Graz in Austria.
Grew has participated in the discovery and confirmation of 31 new minerals approved by the Commission on New Minerals, Nomenclature and Classification (CNMNC) of the International Mineralogical Association.  Walters helped to recruit speakers for the meeting program.  Here is the solicitation for manuscripts in the special birthday collection:
“Throughout his remarkable career, Ed Grew has deciphered and shared the deep-time stories locked in rocks and minerals. In works of meticulous scholarship and deep insight, Ed has revealed the rich context and varied processes of mineral formation in Precambrian complexes in Greenland, the Aldan shield, southern India and Antarctica, as well as younger metamorphic suites in Tajikistan and western Europe. He is the world’s authority on the minerals of lithium, beryllium, and boron, including pioneering studies on their mineral  evolution and ecology. His work on the classification of minerals in the garnet and sapphirine supergroups are classic contributions. In short, Ed Grew’s influence on the mineralogical community has been lasting and profound. This special issue in Mineralogical Magazine is in honour of Ed Grew’s long and distinguished career and welcomes a wide range of contributions that touch on the varied aspects of his research, including (but not limited to) complex pegmatites, the geology and mineralogy of Antarctica, metamorphic minerals, the minerals of rare elements, mineral evolution, and varied aspects of petrologic mineralogy.
Guest Editors: Gerhard Franz, Robert Martin, Jesse Walters, Barb Dutrow”
The cover photograph on the special issue shows Ed at his camp in January 1978 at “Dallwitz Nunatak” in East Antarctica while he was on the Australian National Antarctic Research Expedition. In 1968, W. B. Dallwitz discovered this first locality in the world for the ultra-high-temperature mineral assemblage sapphirine plus quartz.

Yale University hosted the 2025 New England Intercollegiate Geological Conference (NEIGC) in Connecticut, and the twelve 91���� attendees arrived ready for adventure. The weather was fantastic for field trips, where students explored tracks at Dinosaur State Park, outcrops of mineral-rich hydrothermal veins in Trumbull, and columnar basalt from the failed rift at Castle Craig Tower. Students also explored the mineral and fossil exhibits at the Yale Peabody Museum, and learned about internship opportunities in their collections facilities.

A number of University of Maine students and faculty members will present at the 2023 Maine Sustainability and Water Conference at the Augusta Civic Center on March 30. 91����’s Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions is the lead organizer of the event.

For more information and to register, visit the event webpage.

Session chairs include Parker Gassett, Climate Resilience Coordinator, Maine Climate Science Information Exchange, Maine Sea Grant, for the session Applied Research to Advance Coastal Climate Resilience; Andres Urcuqui-Bustamante, Ph.D. student at the School of Forest Resources, for the session Protecting Key Ecosystems through Integrated Pest Management in Maine; Sharon Klein, professor at the School of Economics and Mitchell Center Faculty Fellow, for the session Maine Community Resilience Partnership: Supporting Local Climate and Energy Action; and Caroline Noblet, associate professor at the School of Economics, and masters student Charity Zimmerman for the session Voices of the PFAS Issue in Maine.

Session presenters include Jessica Reilly-Moman, former Ph.D. student at the Darling Marine Center; Sean M.C. Smith, associate professor at the Earth and Climate Sciences and  Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions; Mark Jordan, Ph.D. student at the School of Earth and Climate Sciences; Julie Gosse, associate professor of biochemistry; Andrei Alyokhin, professor of applied entomology; Stephanie Hurd, Ph.D. student in ecology and environment sciences; Regina Smith, program manager at the Cooperative Forestry Research Unit; David Handley, vegetable and small fruit specialist at 91���� Extension; Alex Scearce, masters student of plant, soils and environmental science; Erin Percival Carter, assistant professor of marketing at the Maine Business School; and Kathleen Bell, professor at the School of Economics.

Undergraduate student poster presenters include Noah Burby, Honors College, School of Molecular and Biomedical Sciences; Angeline Casella and Robert “Cade” King, School of Earth and Climate Sciences; Hayden Libby, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering; and Molly Shea and Bruce Wyatt, School of Economics.

Graduate student poster presenters include Yuksel Rudy Alkarem, Liam Hanley, Nicolas Cyr and Debora Barros, Coasts, Oceans, Ports, and Rivers Institute (COPRI); Taylor Bailey, Vanessa Mahan, Elisabeth Younce, Grace Johnson and Simin Moavenzadeh Ghaznavi, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering; Abigail Bennett, School of Forest Resources; Beth Davis, School of Biology and Ecology; Gabrielle Hillyer and Rachel White, Department of Ecology and Environmental Sciences; B Lauer and Jennifer Smith-Mayo, Department of Communication and Journalism; Alissa Miller-Gonzalez, Charity Zimmerman and Benjamin Cotton, School of Economics.

The Dartmouth Alumni Magazine has featured School of Earth and Climate Sciences Research Professor Edward Grew in the May-June 2023 issue. Grew was a class of 1966 geology major at Dartmouth prior to his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1971. The Dartmouth Alumni Profile was written by Lizzy Strapp, Dartmouth Class of 2025. The magazine commissioned artist Robert Neubecker to create an illustration of Grew collecting minerals. Neubecker’s illustrations appear in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Science and other leading national publications. Grew is featured because he has discovered or assisted in the approval of 25 newly identified minerals.

May 2, 2023  

A University of Maine Ph.D. candidate has created a new mapping tool that can help scientists and resource managers better predict how vulnerable different coastal estuary settings in Maine are to pollution.

Pollution vulnerability in estuaries and bays can be determined by the source of contamination, how it is transported to coastal waters and how long it can last before flushing out to sea based on the physical and hydrological characteristics of the watershed, also known as residence time. The “Estuary Builder” tool, developed by Bea Van Dam from 91����’s School of Earth and Climate Sciences, provides related data for stream and river watersheds and embayments along the entire Maine coastline.

Van Dam, who is advised by 91���� associate professor Sean Smith, developed the Estuary Builder to assist with the management of harmful coastal bacteria pollution events that affect shellfisheries. Bacteria and other contaminants on land can run off into estuaries during large rain events, and they travel through coastal waterways where they can be taken up by clams and other filter feeders. The consumption of these contaminated shellfish can cause sickness, so the Maine Department of Marine Resources temporarily closes mudflats where clams and filter feeders reside within the affected watersheds.

The Estuary Builder allows users to draw an outlet line across an embayment mouth on an ArcGIS map to receive pollution-related information for the estuary and contributing watershed. It also identifies which of several archetypical Maine coastal setting types the delineated area belongs to, allowing managers to make comparisons to similar areas of the coast.

Van Dam created the tool by incorporating one of the most comprehensive spatial datasets for Maine’s coastal watersheds and estuaries, which she assembled, and using machine learning to teach it how to use those data to examine the vulnerability of varied coastal settings and conditions to estuary pollution.

By providing a decision support tool with an extensive and accessible dataset, Van Dam’s Estuary Builder can help officials better determine where to augment monitoring capacity and the timing of shellfish flat closures, and how to respond to coastal pollution problems. By identifying the pollution culprits, the tool helps to protect consumers from harmful bacteria, limits the occurrence of closures and optimizes the capacity of coastal resource managers. All of these benefits also better support the livelihoods of shellfish harvesters, seafood businesses and coastal communities.

“Shellfishing is such an integral part of both the economy and the culture of coastal Maine, and pollution problems threaten that,” Van Dam says. “This tool is a culmination of stakeholder engagement, data acquisition and synthesis and code development that puts managers just a few mouse clicks away from information about coastal settings to improve capacity to sustainably manage coastal resources into the future.”

Van Dam’s project builds on a multiyear effort by an interdisciplinary team of 91���� scientists to develop several resources that would help predict bacterial pollution problems affecting shellfishing industries along Maine’s coast.

The Watershed Process and Estuary Sustainability Research Group (WPES) is co-led by Smith and Lauren Ross, a 91���� associate professor of hydraulics and water resources engineering. The research was initiated by a National Science Foundation EPSCOR (Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research) grant led by the Senator George J. Mitchell Center for Sustainability Solutions. The outgrowth of the effort has included extensive work funded by the Maine Water Resources Research Institute and the Maine Agriculture and Forest Experiment Station to measure, model and map conditions driving coastal bacteria pollution in thousands of stream and river watersheds draining into Maine’s tidal coastline.

Smith and colleagues have identified many information gaps along the way, with several related to rainfall and snowmelt runoff pathways in more than 1,000 miles of Maine’s coast, including the entire Portland peninsula and other parts of the state’s most densely populated cities and towns. He and Van Dam have worked toward resolving those gaps, which resulted in the expanded flow path dataset that Van Dam created and used in the design of the Estuary Builder, as well as a Clustering and Vulnerability Analysis for hundreds of tidal embayments and sub-embayments along the length of Maine’s coast.

The Estuary Builder tool establishes a solid foundation for a new generation of decision support tools for coastal resource managers in Maine that can be improved over time and adapted into other coastal regions. Research by WPES affiliates on land-sea connection dynamics in reference watersheds and estuaries has been a big part of that effort. The work has involved over a dozen graduate and undergraduate students who conducted watershed and estuary modeling, stream measurements, sediment sampling, water quality measurements, and stakeholder engagement that will provide information to expand on Van Dam’s foundational work in the future.

“All of the investigative research work has led to a comprehensive assembly of land-sea connection information and knowledge in the form of Van Dam’s Estuary Builder that can benefit Maine communities now and in the future,” Smith says.

Visit the WPES website for more information about the Estuary Builder, related research on harmful algal blooms in Frenchman Bay by Ph.D. candidate Taylor Bailey and other ongoing projects from the group.

May 17, 2023  

Creating new, more accurate methods for quantifying the stress and flow rate experienced by deforming rocks at the boundaries of moving tectonic plates is the goal of a University of Maine study funded with a $392,372 National Science Foundation grant.

Scott Johnson, a professor of structural geology, and Senthil Vel, a professor of mechanical engineering, will develop these new calculations in collaboration with a postdoctoral researcher, a Ph.D. student and up to three undergraduates from the School of Earth and Climate Sciences or Department of Mechanical Engineering. They also will work with Greg Hirth, a professor at Brown University in Rhode Island, and David Prior, a professor at Otago University in New Zealand.

The stress on rocks from tectonic plate movement causes them to flow, and this flow is what causes mountains to grow and also triggers earthquakes. More insight into these stresses and related flow leads to a better understanding of fundamental plate tectonic processes, and can inform decision making in construction, infrastructure maintenance and emergency preparedness.

A common method for relating the stress and flow rate involves mathematical equations known as flow laws. These equations are derived through laboratory deformation experiments and are associated with specific microstructural characteristics such as mineral shape and size. For example, through these experiments, it has been shown that the average size of a mineral such as quartz that recrystallizes during deformation is directly proportional to the applied stress.

While these existing flow laws are effective, they involve significant uncertainties related to estimates of average recrystallized grain size and the activation energy associated with the flow process, and there are currently no other methods available with which to compare results.  91���� researchers aim to develop a new method based on the roughness of mineral grain boundaries and explore how they can record stress and flow rates.

This new method is based on the principle that the roughness of a grain boundary reflects the competition between elastic energy stored as defects in the crystal structure and surface energy stored at the grain boundary. The rougher the grain boundary, the more surface energy is being stored. According to researchers, this roughness is proportional to both applied stress and flow rate through a fractal dimension.

“Fractal roughness is used extensively in the physical, natural and social sciences to evaluate properties as diverse as material strength, cloud formation and urban sprawl,” Johnson says. “The specific technique we are employing was proposed in the 1990s, but has not been further developed until now. Our preliminary data are exciting and we anticipate it will open up new avenues of research in material and Earth science that will benefit scientists, engineers and the general public.”

The research has two main components focussing on laboratory deformation experiments and field-based measurements. The laboratory experiments involve the deformation of polycrystalline quartz samples under tightly controlled conditions of temperature, applied stress and resulting flow rate. The fractal dimension values measured in these deformed samples will be used to calibrate researchers’ new method. Simultaneously, fractal dimension values will be determined in deformed polycrystalline quartz aggregates from the Sandhill Corner shear zone, located in Somerville, Maine. The shear zone is part of the Norumbega fault system, which lies along the southern half of Maine and spans from its western border to the western edge of New Brunswick, Canada.

As part of this work, new protocols are being developed for automated measurement of grain perimeters using electron backscatter diffraction techniques using the scanning electron microscope in the School of Earth and Climate Sciences.

Applying their new, experimentally calibrated method to the Sandhill Corner rocks will allow researchers to compare results with those from existing flow laws and hopefully provide an alternative method for evaluating stress and flow rate. In addition, the Norumbega fault system serves as an ancient analog for the currently active San Andreas fault system in California, so the results will have direct application to earthquake faults.

“This interdisciplinary project is the latest in a series of NSF projects involving faculty and students from Earth sciences and mechanical engineering to develop new computational techniques and codes that will help us understand the influence of microstructure on the macroscopic properties of heterogeneous material systems,” Vel says. “The outcomes are applicable beyond Earth Sciences and will allow materials scientists to engineer the strength of metals, ceramics and advanced composite materials.”

August 8, 2023 

Peatlands are a treasure trove of organic material. Researchers at the University of Maine are using their knowledge of hydrogeology and computer modeling to understand exactly what these overlooked areas contribute to the greater environment and how to ethically manage them.

Peatlands are marshy collections of dead and decaying plant matter. They are often referred to as fens or bogs, such as the Orono Bog in 91����. These ecosystems provide habitats for threatened species with nowhere else to go and act as water reservoirs for surrounding areas in times of drought. They are also a heavily influential part of the carbon cycle because they both release methane and store about a third of all the carbon in soil globally. When damaged, peatlands emit large amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere that contribute to climate change.

Andy Reeve, hydrogeologist and professor at the School of Earth and Climate Sciences at 91����, is collaborating with others on a grant they received from the National Science Foundation to study how the surrounding geology influences groundwater flow within Maine peatlands, including Caribou Bog in 91����. These factors influence the emission of methane and carbon dioxide, two common greenhouse gasses, from the bog.

“If we want to control global warming, we need to understand where carbon is coming from and where it’s going,” says Reeve.

Much of his work involves installing and monitoring wells in the peatlands, which create an access point for him to measure the peat’s hydraulic properties. Using the data he collects working in the bog, Reeve creates computer models to simulate possible scenarios for the movement of chemicals in the groundwater. 

“In hydrogeology, because you’re using wells you only have sparse data, you need something to combine all of that data in a sensible way and a model lets you do that,” says Reeve. “You can run a model and try to get the water levels and pressures to measure up with reality. It may not be realistic, but it’s a plausible model of what might be going on. You can run simulations that give you a way of testing ideas about how different factors influence the peatland, [like] how increased rainfall will affect the peatland, [or] how increased evaporation will influence the peat.” 

Computer models can be configured to simulate the consequences of climate change or the development of flow patterns in peatland ecosystems. These changes in groundwater flow impact the exchange of carbon-based gas between the peatland and the atmosphere.

Reeve’s hydrogeology career began in the late 1980s, when environmental regulations, put in place due to concern over environmental contamination, drove an urgent need for hydrogeology specialists. He recalls a rapid turnover in the environmental business, a period of ‘wild west-like’ growth in opportunities. He conducted research in the Mangrove Swamps of Mexico and the Hudson Bay Lowlands before finding his way to Maine in 1996, where he still works as a mentor to the next generation of hydrogeologists.

“Most students I teach don’t go into peatland science — that’s a tiny niche field — but by going out and seeing how a well is installed and monitored, they get the gist and then they can go out and work on other issues,” Reeve says. “I see the peatland system work and the modeling we do as a good way for them to understand what hydrogeology is, and they can apply those things to waste sites or developing a municipal well field or whatever else they go off and do.” 

Ph.D student Victoria Niedzinski works closely with Reeve on this project, mainly learning to structure efficient groundwater models using the coding language Python. She describes Reeve as a ‘Python wizard’ and has gained valuable knowledge from him in coding as well as hydrology and carbon cycling. 

“When you walk in [to the bog], [Andy] will be able to point out the different plants and vegetation, he’ll know why certain plants are the way they are just because of the hydrology of the system,” says Niedzinski. “He has a great sense of humor, so it’s always lots of jokes, lot’s of trying to keep things light while we’re slogging through the bog for eight hours.”

Niedzinski intends to use what she has learned to continue with a career in understanding climate change through hydrology. 

While overall interest and funding for the field of hydrogeology has decreased since its ‘boom’ in the late ’80s and ’90s, Reeve expects a resurgence in the need for professionals with this specific set of knowledge in light of approaching challenges to the environment. 

“Climate change is going to drive a need for hydrologists that can mitigate the problems. We know there’s climate change, that problem has been defined and now it’s time to engineer solutions. Whether it’s providing irrigation water to Maine crops or figuring out what to do in the south when there are droughts, groundwater is going to be a part of that solution,” says Reeve. 

This story was written by Erin Cabral, 2023 Summer Intern at the 91���� Division of Marketing at Communications. 

Contact: Sam Schipani samantha.schipani@maine.edu

The Coastal and Estuarine Research Federation (CERF) announced that associate professors Lauren Ross and Sean Smith received the 2023 Donald W. Pritchard Outstanding Physical Oceanography Paper Award for “.” Ross and Smith co-authored the paper with Sohaib Alahmed, former 91���� student and graduate civil engineer at Halff Engineering and Architecture Firm.

CERF recognizes excellence in and service to the fields of coastal and estuarine science, management and education through eight awards given biennially. The recipients of the awards embody the mission of CERF to advance understanding and wise stewardship of estuarine and coastal ecosystems worldwide by promoting research in estuarine and coastal ecosystems; supporting the education of scientists, decision-makers and the public; and facilitating communication among these groups.

The 2023 CERF Awards Ceremony will be held Nov. 12 at the 27th Biennial Conference at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, Oregon. More information about the awards and recipients, including past recipients, can be found on the .

September 5, 2023 

The Department of Defense (DOD) has awarded $1,504,063 to a University of Maine project quantifying snowpack properties in the Arctic led by School of Earth and Climate Sciences faculty members Chris Gerbi and Seth Campbell, who also is affiliated with the Climate Change Institute.

Characterizing and predicting the characteristics of snow-covered regions is a critical gap in the U.S. Army’s readiness to respond to sub-Arctic and Arctic threats, which become increasingly relevant in light of aggressive posturing from other northern latitude countries.

Beyond the Army, quantifying the differences in water content of snow aides in predictions that support water resource management decisions from streamflow to drinking water. This research will utilize observations at sites on the scale of centimeters to hundreds of meters as the basis for training instrumentation for remote sensing and prediction over watersheds and larger regions. The spatial and temporal variability of snow properties makes predictions across landscapes particularly challenging. However, given that around one third of the Earth’s land surface receives some amount of annual snowfall, having the ability to improve predictions of snow water content in different terrain will have widespread impact.

“Our national security needs include knowledge of the physical characteristics of the surfaces on which the military may be operating, as well as where conflict may arise due to natural hazards such as flooding or drought,” Gerbi says. “This project gives the military tools to improve their preparation for deployments.”

The team’s research will couple multiple remote and ground-based geophysical methods — including different kinds of radar, interferometry and LiDAR — to characterize the snowpack at two contrasting study sites in Southeast Alaska and Maine. These geophysical datasets provide ground truth for the development of computational approaches to measure snowpack properties. 

The two study areas were chosen because of the differences in their typical snowpacks. Southeast Alaska receives between 6 and 12 meters of temperate snowfall annually, providing a long accumulation and melt season. In contrast, Maine’s annual snowfall only reaches up to 2.7 meters. The contrast of snowfall amounts, terrain and vegetation cover between Alaska and Maine provide an opportunity to quantify the mechanisms that drive snowpack evolution. Both locations can be unpredictable and variable in their snowpack behavior, too, which make them excellent candidates for testing a new and improved algorithm.

“Despite their geographic separation, Maine and Alaska experience many of the same environmental challenges, so it is a natural fit to link the two field sites for this project,” Gerbi says.

This project is a collaboration between the University of Maine, University of Alaska Southeast, University of Alaska Fairbanks, and the Foundation for Glacier and Environmental Research. Over 36 months, the team of a dozen researchers will use data collected from these two regions to develop an algorithm for predicting temperate snowpack properties and meltwater patterns from meteorological or remotely sensed data. 

The award started June 21, 2022, and field research will begin this winter.

Story written by Sam Schipani.

Contact: Marcus Wolf, 207.581.3721; marcus.wolf@maine.edu

Over the last four decades, warming climate and ocean temperatures have rapidly altered the Greenland Ice Sheet, creating concern for marine ecosystems and weather patterns worldwide. The environment has challenged scientists in their attempts to measure how water moves around and melts the ice sheet because equipment can be destroyed by icebergs floating near the glaciers.

Collected using a novel approach, research from the University of Maine has unearthed new information to help scientists better understand circulation patterns of ocean water around glaciers. A group of pioneers in glacial research attached GPS devices to icebergs and used their mobility to understand fjord circulation, which can ultimately enhance the accuracy of climate models. 

In the summers of 2014 and 2019, the GPS devices tracked hourly changes in the position of 13 icebergs as they passed through Greenland’s Ilulissat Icefjord toward the ocean. Starting as research during her time at the University of Oregon, 91���� assistant professor of geomatics Kristin Schild collected the fjord data with a colleague from UO, earth sciences professor and oceanographer David Sutherland. In 2020, an undergraduate student, Sydney Baratta, used these datasets as the focus of her senior capstone project. Continuing the research into her graduate studies, Baratta processed and analyzed her findings and recently published the results in the .

Study results showed circulation in the primary fjord is greatly affected by freshwater flow from connecting tributary fjords, which is critically important to consider in circulation models. Such models can range from studying ocean currents to predicting the speed at which sea level could rise. 

“Being able to utilize the many icebergs that are in this fjord is really unique to the study,” said Baratta. 

Ilulissat Icefjord is home to Sermeq Kujalleq, one of the fastest and most active glaciers in the world. This makes the fjord a good, but challenging location to understand glaciers’ interaction with the ocean and predict how the icy giants respond to ocean warming. 

“Think about ice cubes in a glass of water. They float,” said Baratta. “But if it’s in a fjord, under the influence of other forces like wind and the currents, the icebergs move around. What we wanted to do was put GPS trackers on those icebergs to infer what the circulation in the fjord is and see how that is influenced by the environment.”

Carlos Moffat, who researches glacier-ocean interactions and polar oceanography at the University of Delaware, said equipment stationed in fjords is commonly crushed by all the movement. How Schild collected these datasets, he said, was innovative. Instead of viewing the icebergs as an obstacle, she used them as a tool to carry and protect the equipment.  

“It’s a situation where the thing you’re interested in is destroying your gear,” said Moffat. “So what they’ve done in this study is basically flip the script.”

Impact beyond the Arctic

Greenland, where Ilulissat Icefjord is located, and Antarctica have the largest fresh water reservoirs of ice in the world. How quickly the ice sheets melt contribute to sea level rise worldwide. In Greenland and Antarctica, glaciers “dip their toes” in ocean water, Moffat said, which can allow ocean warming to accelerate how quickly the ice melts or breaks into icebergs.

Lauren Ross, 91���� associate professor of hydraulics and water resources engineering, said Baratta, Schild and Sutherland’s findings will be useful for a range of research relating to fjord circulation, including her area of expertise — the transport of material in water. 

She recently studied how freshwater flowing into a fjord negatively impacted the growth of a harmful microscopic algae. Unlike in Greenland, more freshwater helped the economy and ecosystems surrounding the fjord.

“In order to be as accurate as possible, we have to have the most accurate data to feed into the models,” said Ross. “I think it’s going to become more and more important as the climate warms.”

Similar to Ross’ reflection, Schild said recognizing that changes are happening in the environment is the starting point. Scientists are now working to fill gaps in research to represent the changing environment and create better predictive models.

“Glaciers have reshaped global climate and ecosystems for millions of years,” said 91���� President Joan Ferrini-Mundy. “Novel research from our world-renowned climate scientists provides more insight into how they interact with their surrounding environments and plays a vital role in predicting our climate future.” 

Data processing and analysis was supported by grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and NASA’s Early Career Investigator Program, which focuses on the use of space-based remote sensing and model integration to benefit humanity.

While the ever-altering Greenland Ice Sheet has dramatic local impact, it is the top of a slippery slope slanted toward changes worldwide. What happens in the frozen fjords 2,000 miles to the north of Maine affects New England’s seafood cuisine and has a role in the increasingly devastating storms along the coast. 

“Everything is interconnected,” said Baratta. “Changes happening in the Arctic can have trickle-down effects that impact what we see in Maine.”

Contact: Ashley Yates, ashley.depew@maine.edu