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Pictured from left to right: Dr. Harry Rowe, Dr. Arne Winguth, and Dr. "Max" Hu
Three assistant professors in the UT Arlington Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, along with colleagues at two other institutions, have just been awarded a $566,000 grant from the National Science Foundation’s Paleo Perspectives on Climate Change program. Almost $320,000 of the three-year grant has been awarded to UT Arlington. Drs. Harry Rowe, Arne Winguth, and Max Hu, all recent hires at UTA, are studying how the climate system in eastern North America evolved during the last eight glacial-interglacial cycles, which cover the last 600,000 years of Earth’s history. Rowe and Hu, both geochemists, are reconstructing climate change using chemical and isotopic records preserved in cave stalagmites recovered from the Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee and West Virginia. Each stalagmite is age-dated using a method called 230Th dating. Then, each 0.5-mm layer within a stalagmite is sampled with a drill and analyzed for its geochemical and stable isotopic composition. These data will help define the timing, duration, and magnitude of climatic disturbances like droughts and seasonal shifts in precipitation.
Winguth, a climate modeler, is using the climate reconstructions as a guide to develop and refine simulations of the climate system for key periods of rapid climate change. Specifically, Winguth is focusing on the Younger Dryas episode, an anomalously cold interval that ended ~11,600 years ago. The Younger Dryas has been portrayed as a ~1000-year-long period during which the climate abruptly cooled, and then warmed to near-modern temperatures in the span of a few years. These are the types of rapid climate changes that are believed to be most dangerous to the wellbeing of human populations.
Preliminary results from their study identify not only the climate response in eastern North America during the Younger Dryas and other cold/glacial episodes, but also several more abrupt shifts in precipitation that occurred during the last 7,000 years, a period when the Earth’s climate has traditionally been thought of as being relatively stable. Previously reconstructed paleoclimate records from the eastern United States go back only 12,000 to 20,000 years, thus, the record and the climate model simulations derived from the present study have the potential to dramatically enhance our understanding of the history and causes of climate change in a heavily populated portion of the planet.