Adirondack Climate Research
Ph 518-327-6342
J. Curt Stager, Ph.D.
Professor of Natural Sciences
Paul Smith's College, NY
&
Research Associate
Climate Change Institute
University of Maine, Orono
A practical guide to past and future climate change in the Champlain-Adirondack region, and what it means for water resources in the region. (with Mary Thill, for The Nature Conservancy, 2010)
About Adirondack Climate Research
My students and I collect sediment cores from Adirondack lakes and use them as archives of long-term environmental change.
Our primary goal is to reconstruct regional precipitation over the last millennium or more, using diatoms (fossil algae) as indicators of past droughts and flooding. An additional goal is to involve Paul Smith's College students directly in publishable, place-based climate change research.
We have thus far shown that our diatom records can reproduce annual precipitation patterns of the past century with 1-4 year resolution. This is close to the resolution of long tree ring and ice core records which have been used elsewhere for such purposes, but which are not available here.
We would now like to extend our analyses farther back in time, well beyond the range of observational records. This would help to resolve lingering uncertainties among climate models regarding future precipitation trends in the North Country as the world continues to warm. Unfortunately, traditional funding sources for this kind of research are becoming unreliably scarce.
If you have advice for finding sources of support, or would like to contribute and/or participate in this work, please contact me by email (cstager@paulsmiths.edu, or click "email me") or by phone.
Interested in learning more?
Bringing global climate change down to the local level
For more deep-time perspectives on global and regional environmental change, see "Deep Future: The Next 100,000 Years of Life on Earth." (St. Martin's Press, 2011).
ABOVE: video intro to paleo research at PSC
