David Christianson
University of Wyoming, WY·Earth & Environmental Science
High in some mountain ranges, small patches of ice have survived for up to 10,000 years. That makes them some of the oldest ice on Earth outside the polar regions.
- Fields
Earth & Environmental Science
Ecology & Evolution
- Topics
ice patches
ice cores
paleoclimate
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2028
What they work on
- Recover ice cores from ice patches in the northern Rocky Mountains and Alaska and build Holocene records of stable water isotopes, ice accretion rates and macrofossil deposition.
- Evaluate and document cultural artifacts and animal remains preserved in the ice patches to trace past human and animal activity in alpine landscapes.
- Combine weather data, ice patch extent and borehole temperature profiles in energy-balance models to find the conditions under which ice patches form, persist, shrink and disappear.
More about the research
These ice patches act as frozen archives. They trap records of past climate, plants, animals and human activity in high-elevation places where few long-term records exist. They are also shrinking. This collaborative project studies ice patches in the northern Rocky Mountains and Alaska. It asks how these features have lasted through thousands of years of changing climate and how they may fare in the future.
Why it matters
Alpine ice patches hold rare records of past climate, ecosystems and human history, and they are at risk of melting away. These records and models could help predict how alpine environments and their water resources will change. That information matters to mountain communities who depend on these resources, and the work could help preserve archaeological material before it is lost.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Shaun Marcott
University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI·Earth & Environmental Science
Date the thinning of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet by measuring 135 beryllium-10 exposure ages along about 15 vertical mountain transects in western Canada, known as the "glacial dipstick" approach.
Stephen Keller
University of Vermont, VT·Ecology & Evolution
Reconstruct about 13,000 years of alpine plant community history at the species level using ancient DNA from lake sediment cores in the Adirondacks, Green and White Mountains, and Katahdin.
Francois Lanoe
University of Arkansas, AR·Social Science
Reconstruct subsistence economies at Broken Mammoth over time, including diet breadth and seasonal land use, through zooarchaeological analysis of the site's large animal bone collection.
The school
University of Wyoming: 8 labs on PI Pages, $167M a year on research, 108 research doctorates a year.
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