UB researchers studying the sediment at the bottom of a lake in Canada may have found some startling indication that global warming is occurring faster than predicted.
Jason Briner, assistant professor of geology, participated in the study along with UB student researchers, researchers from the University of Colorado and Queens University, and experts specializing in analyzing bug fossils and algae.
The research team made a trip to see the lake that has people talking.
'There are lots of steps to the overall process. It starts by going to [the] arctic ourselves and figuring out how to get to these sights and then figuring out how to get cores of the sediments out from the bottom of the lake,' Briner said.
Lake CF8 was originally discovered in 2002, located by the Clyde River on Baffin Island between Greenland and the Canadian mainland.
'We need to come up with clever ways to reconstruct how climate has changed in the past,' Briner said. 'One of the ways we do that is reading the information stored in lake sediments.'
Researchers collected samples from the lake, which are then shipped back to the UB Geology Department and put into cold storage until they can be analyzed. The earth itself goes through natural warming and cooling intervals, but the sediments reveal a change in the Earth's natural cycle.
The lake is different from other lakes that have been studied, and researchers have decided to study it further because of the long sediment record contained at the bottom, Briner said.
'In the case of this one lake that we found, what's unique about it is the sediments contained at the bottom of this lake go back at least 200,000 years, which is a really long time for sediments preserved in lakes from the arctic,' Briner said. 'There's a well known pattern on climate and how the arctic changes through time, and that pattern all of a sudden is different.'
The difference between the sediments is the extended warming interval the earth is currently going through.
'We see this pattern in our lake sediments – but the most recent sediments first got warm 10,000 years ago and [have] been cooling ever since, except for these recent sediments. It's more similar to the beginning of these warm periods,' Briner said. 'We started to get colder and we jumped back up and got warmer in the arctic.'
A study was recently done on the frozen ice pack, or sea ice, in the arctic. Researchers walked on the sea ice and then drilled through it to figure out how thick it was. The results were startling.
'They found the sea ice thickness was thinner than people thought. Arctic sea ice could be disappearing even faster than computer models have been simulating,' Briner said. 'The sea ice could be gone in a decade.'
Every summer the arctic ice disappears and then reforms in the winter, but not to the same extent. This has an impact on the ecosystem, affecting arctic animals' habits, hunting on the ice and the strength of hurricanes.
'It plays a huge role in the earth's energy balance,' said Briner.
Greenhouse gases are only part of the problem, Briner said.
'I do think that while there are a lot of greenhouse gas admissions within the pipeline and we're going to see the arctic continue to warm, that we do need to have an immediate response to decreasing those greenhouse gases,' Briner said. 'The human impact on the system is going to become really clear.'
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Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
