tubes of greenland sediment cores cut lengthwise reveal a time machine with thousands of years of climate clues for the ph.d. students in northwestern university’s geocal, the geoperspective on climate and life, laboratory.

the ph.d. students conducted field research trips to greenland this past summer to excavate and bring back sediment cores to study the environmental changes in the earth’s history, which can then be compared to climate changes today.

the ph.d. students do their research about the past to put today’s pace of climate change into perspective. third-year ph.d. student mia tuccillo studies organic remains preserved in sediments to look at climate change over time.

“i’m really interested in this contemporary situation that we’re in: [an era] of seeing arctic landscapes change really rapidly with temperature change in terms of their ecological productivity,” said tuccillo. “so i’m focused on human impacts of the last 400 years.”

tuccillo said the implications of “arctic greening” motivates them to continue their work. arctic greening is the lengthened growing season in the arctic from earlier snowmelt resulting from climate change. one example, said tuccillo, of arctic greening is when plants migrate north and the algae and the photosynthesizing bacteria called cyanobacteria in lakes become more abundant.

tuccillo said she looks at microscopic organic compounds – pigments like chlorophyll from algae in her research – to study climate history because greenland sediment cores usually don’t preserve much terrestrial, or land, plant material.

chlorophyll is the green pigments plants use in photosynthesis, the process powered by sunlight to turn carbon dioxide and water into sugar that plants can then use for food, said tuccillo. “and so if you find one of these organic compounds in the sediment core, you can infer that there was an organism that was photosynthesizing at that time … there are different pigments that relate to different organisms.”

tuccillo is currently studying a 0.5 meter sedimentary core from southern greenland that her peers excavated, including fourth-year ph.d. student peter puleo, second-year ph.d. student bailey nash and second-year ph.d. student aidan burdick.

puleo, who studies the climate history of greenland and the upper midwest, described the excavation of the sediment core, saying they were standing on a custom-built inflatable raft. puleo said they then use a series of pulleys, ropes and weights to drop the tube that holds the sediment cores into the lake bottom and back up.

“these lakes are really useful for us as tools for reconstructing the climate because the sediment generally piles in over time and forms really neat layers, said puleo. “and they really easily record environmental changes … the color of the sediment and how much plant materials and sediment, all these different things, help us reconstruct environmental change and climate change.”

the core puleo displayed covered a climate record of thousands of years.

“the planet isn’t just changing, its changed,” thomas wagner, nasa cryosphere program scientist says at the top of our video. 

we would not be the first to use that specific quote from wagner prominently either. looking back at news stories wagner had been quoted in, reuters, the huffington post and al-jazeera america all used a nearly identical quote from wagner from a teleconference call with the press about new sea level data in august 2015.

over the past few years wagner has been a source for the new york times, the washington post, the los angeles times, pbs newshour, newsweek and fox news. our own interview with wagner faced a time constraint as he had a televised interview scheduled after ours. 

wagner’s vast usage as a source, and some of his practiced/repeated key-points highlight an important job researchers have that is easy to overlook. 

environmental scientists looking at climate change are not only responsible for discovery, but for effectively communicating those discoveries. 

when i mentioned to wagner that about his frequent media appearances he said, “you know what it is, it gets easier the more you do it. (it’s) kinda like after a while you build up answers to the questions.” 

but there is more to it than him publishing a report. he needs to explain it to informants in a way that is easy to understand. wagner spent six years as a professor at the university of papua new guinea before he moved on to nasa, which most likely plays a role in wagner being able to effectively communicate his message to reporters and the general public. 

unless the masses start flocking to nasa’s blogs, it will be up to mega-sources like wagner to get the message out through various news outlets through a compelling and comprehensible message.

it is what lies under the ocean floor, oil, which has the inupiat people concerned and conflicted. the inupiat people fear that an accident, like the deepwater horizon explosion and subsequent oil spill in the gulf coast in 2010, could jeopardize their entire way of life. however, the inupiat also need the jobs and regional economic boost that would accompany offshore drilling.

siikauraq whiting, the mayor of kotzebue, says, “to the rest of america, unless you come and eat our food, walk our land…unless you really know who we are as inupiat people, then you can’t really appreciate that this is inupiat life.”