Local skiers and snowboarders who found this winter's lack of snowfall disappointing might want to start heading even further North.
According to Jason Briner, Ph.D., the climate of New York State could shift to one resembling the southern part of the country within the next 63 years.
"By 2070, the seasons and climate of New York State will probably equal that of what North Carolina's is now," Briner said.
Briner, an assistant professor at UB, has been studying the effects of global warming and climate change for years. His ominous findings fall in line with a report released in Oct. 2006 by the Union of Concerned Scientists, which analyzes the rate of temperature increase worldwide.
"The glaciers are melting like crazy," Briner said. "At low elevations, they do melt faster, but the glacier retreat since the 1950s is very significant."
Briner's research in the in the Canadian Arctic has made him a well-known paleoclimatologist. He and his team of graduate students and post-doctoral associates chose an island in the Arctic called Baffin Island as their test site for gathering quantitative temperature data.
"We study the core layers, ice sheets and glaciers and link that with temperature climate history," Briner said.
Every May, Briner and his team return to the island to take measurements and test new sites. After flying into remote villages occupied by Eskimos, using sleds and snowmobiles the group makes its way across the barren Arctic landscape to different lakes and glaciers in the region. There they set up camp and begin their quest to find any clues or answers to the global warming phenomenon.
"I'm just one small piece of the puzzle," Briner said. "But to try to get the best sense of what is going on we study different sites and ask why does this pattern exist? What is the pattern?"
After drilling holes through ice that is often more than five feet thick, the team sends long tubes down to the bottom of lakes and into the earth to obtain sediment and deposits. Laboratories at UB then study organic matter from the lakes by cutting the tubes in half and examining evidence that dates from 2005 all the way back to 6000 B.C.E.
"Here we can see what changes have taken place," Briner said. "We can reconstruct the past by gathering temperatures and evidence from the lake deposits."
By studying the amount of organic matter content in the Arctic mud, a paleoclimatologist is able to determine the warmth or coldness of past years. The more organic matter there is, the warmer past summers were. However, scientists also have to factor in that, not too long ago, the Earth went through a small cooling period.
"It's called the 'Little Ice Age.' It began anywhere from 500 to 200 years ago, and most recently ended about 150 years ago," Briner said.
Even armed with this information, scientists believe that within the last 50 years a warming temperature change has not been nature-induced, but rather brought on by humans.
Briner's team not only studies the sediments from the lake, they measure and monitor glaciers as well. Using Google Earth, Briner pointed out where glaciers once dominated the terrain on Baffin Island and how much they have retreated and disappeared.
Briner's team measures glaciers by drilling a hole into the side and placing a melting stake into the hole. Every year they return to the melting stake and measure exactly how much of the ice has melted away. Although the melting rate of the glacier depends on where the stake is placed, Briner said that the ice has been disappearing at an alarming rate.
The paleoclimatologist will return to the Artic in May to continue his research.
"The next step is to increase the number of sites, so we can get a broader sense of and reconstruct past climates. We can get a better sense of global warming patterns and change, and address the problem at hand by putting the study of climate change as a top priority."
