East Greenland

I have been working on a collaborative project in the Scoresby Sund region of central East Greenland since 2004.  A major question that this research addresses is whether enhanced seasonality (i.e., extremely cold winters and only moderately cold summers) characterized abrupt climate events of the last glacial period (e.g., Denton et al., 2005, Quaternary Science Reviews).  Our results support this “seasonality” hypothesis and are discussed in two papers: Kelly et al., 2008 and Hall et al., 2008.  Other publications on Greenland include Kelly and Lowell, 2009 and Kelly and Long, 2009.

Our further work in the Scoresby Sund region is determining the Holocene extents of local ice caps along a transect from a coastal marine setting to near the modern Greenland Ice Sheet to develop proxy records of climate conditions that influenced the ice sheet margin.  Results thus far from this research are described in four papers: Lowell et al., 2013, Levy et al., 2014, Levy et al., 2016, Lusas et al., 2017 and Medford et al., 2021.  We also developed a temperature record from a lake in Milne Land.  This is described here: Axford et al., 2017.

My collaborators on this project are Yarrow Axford (Northwestern University), Ole Bennike (Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland), Brenda Hall (University of Maine), Thomas Lowell (University of Cincinnati), Colby Smith (Geological Survey of Sweden) and graduate students at our respective institutions.

Funding for the East Greenland research is from NSF (ARC-0909270), (ANT-0527946) and the Comer Family Foundation.