Bates College Geologist Receives $50,190 for ClimateChange Research.

(From AScribe)

LEWISTON, Maine -- Michael J. Retelle, a professor of geology at Bates College, is one of 13 scientists across the nation to share nearly $1,500,000 in National Science Foundation funding for Arctic research related to global climate change.

The NSF funds, awarded for a four-year period beginning March 1, support an ongoing project to create a 2,000-year climatic history of the North American Arctic. The researchers are analyzing layers of sediment deposited annually upon Arctic lake beds for clues to climatic conditions during the past two millennia, clues such as sediment thickness and chemical composition.

The NSF grant totals $1,476,442, of which Retelle's share is $50,190. That money will defray costs of analyzing six lake-floor core samples that Retelle has collected in 2003 from lakes on Devon, Cornwallis and Bathurst islands, near Greenland in Canada's Nunavut Territory. Retelle and three students (including Dan Frost, a senior from Farmington, Maine) will process the samples this summer.

Titled "Collaborative Research: A Synthesis of the Last 2,000 Years of Climatic Variability from Arctic Lakes," the NSF-funded project is intended to provide a context for better understanding of current climatic trends. "It's important to try to put the recent climatic warming in a longer-term perspective, and to try to tease out whether what we're looking at is part of the range of natural variability or, indeed, if it's a result of human alteration of the atmosphere," Retelle explains.

"The further we can go back and see how the natural system works, the better we can put this recent warming into context and try to understand what's controlling it."

Analyzing core samples from 30 lakes across a region of the North American Arctic from Alaska to the northwest Atlantic, the researchers will integrate their results of their work and, they hope, be able to announce findings by 2007. The project extends a 400-year Arctic climatic history project whose results were widely publicized in 1997.