Signals of Climate and Environmental Change from Remote Arctic and Alpine Lakes

 

Dr. Mark Abbott

Professor and Chair, Geology and Environmental Science

University of Pittsburgh

 

"Terrestrial paleo records are of wide interest because they provide a means to investigate Earth’s climate system prior to the time when instrumental records were available. Lakes are found worldwide and often are associated with human settlement so they yield information about climate and environmental change at the location where people live. This can sometimes make it difficult to disentangle the effects of climate and environmental change from human activities. Therefore I have focused much of my attention on remote lakes to simplify interpretation of the climate signal.

 

Understanding the causes and impacts of drought using lake level and stable isotope studies has been my main interest. I have focused much of this work on the western Cordillera of the Americas, because it is possible to find remote lakes that have similar characteristics with limited human impact. This makes it possible to compare signals from over great distances, which ultimately provides information about the climatic mechanism responsible for the observed changes.

 

Drought has serious economic consequences including impacts on groundwater, agriculture, hydropower, fisheries, and energy production. Therefore, improving our understanding of the timing, magnitude, duration, and geographic pattern of past wet/dry cycles is an important first step toward determining the causes of drought and their future expression.

 

I will discuss examples from Alaska, Ellesmere Island, and Baffin Island and compare them with alpine systems in western North America and the Tropical Andes. I will end by contrasting these findings with the incredibly complicated systems from the Bolivian Altiplano and the Leon Range in northwestern Spain."