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Climate Change on Canada’s Highest Peak with Alison Criscitiello
November 10, 2023 | 7:30 pm
photo: Leo Hoorn/National Geographic
This event is sponsored by the College of Arts & Sciences, Office of Sustainability, Honors College, Department of Geography & Planning, and Department of Geological & Environmental Sciences
KEYNOTE PRESENTATION WITH NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC EXPLORER DR. ALISON CRISCITIELLO
What can glacier ice tell us about our past, present, and future? That’s what National Geographic Explorer, glaciologist, and mountaineer Dr. Alison Criscitiello seeks to answer through her research atop some of the world’s highest peaks.
Last year, she led an arduous scientific expedition to ascend Mount Logan, Canada’s highest mountain. Battling temperatures as low as -40 F, extreme altitude, and other intense weather conditions, Dr. Cristiciello and her team of six high alpine scientists ascended the mountain and spent two weeks at the summit plateau drilling into the depths of the mountain to extract a 1,073-foot-deep high-altitude ice core from the massive glacier.
This ice core may be the longest climate record in the North Pacific, and the oldest non-polar ice on earth.
Why is reconstructing a climate record on this part of the planet so important and unique? The geography and conditions of Logan’s high plateau offer what is generally only possible at the poles: tens of thousands of years’ worth of climate data. Only by understanding past climate can we predict future change.
Dr. Criscitiello’s critical work is supported by National Geographic Society and Rolex as part of their Perpetual Planet Expeditions program.
This is EVENT is FREE and open to the public.
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ABOUT DR. ALISON CRISCITIELLO
Dr. Alison Criscitiello is the Director of the Canadian Ice Core Lab (CICL) at University of Alberta. Alison is an ice core scientist with extensive field experience in Antarctica, the Canadian high Arctic, Greenland, Alaska, and the Canadian Rockies. Her research in the Antarctic and Canadian high Arctic has focused on developing sea ice proxies in ice cores to investigate how sea ice variability affects ice cap dynamics, and how large-scale global teleconnections affect sea ice distribution and, subsequently, polar ice cap behavior. Broadly, her research utilizes new polar ice core records to address how the marine influence on coastal ice caps and ice sheets has changed over time, and how remote atmospheric dynamics impact regional and local processes and climate. Ultimately, this work helps constrain projections of future contributions of polar ice caps to global sea level, and is extremely valuable in advancing our understanding of the complex and coupled ocean-ice-atmosphere system. Dr. Criscitiello obtained her B.A. in Earth and Environmental Science from Wesleyan University (2003), her M.A. in Geology and Geophysics from Columbia University (2006), and her Ph.D. in Glaciology from the MIT/WHOI Joint Program (2014). She moved to Canada to complete a post-doctoral fellowship at University of Calgary (2014-2016) where she expanded her work in the Canadian Arctic to encompass investigations of environmental contaminants in ice cores, and subsequently began her position as Director of CICL in April 2017.
photo: Leo Hoorn/National Geographic
photo: Leo Hoorn/National Geographic
