Julie Brigham-Grette
Professor of Earth, Geographic, and Climate Sciences | University of Massachusetts Amherst
Amherst, MA, UNITED STATES
Julie Brigham-Grette is an internationally-renowned expert on the Arctic’s climate history and sea-level rise.
Expertise (7)
Polar climate
Arctic Science
Sedimentology
Glaciology
Geological Mapping
Arctic
Polar Science
Biography
Julie Brigham-Grette is an internationally-renowned expert on the Arctic’s climate history and sea-level rise. She is a frequent contributor to media reports including in Science magazine, PBS, NPR and the CBC.
Since 1991, she has participated in nearly a dozen field expeditions to remote regions of Arctic Russia and was co-chief scientist in 2002 of an expedition on the U.S. Coast Guard icebreaker Healy, taking sediment cores from the Bering and Chukchi Seas. She also works closely with Indigenous communities in the Arctic.
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Education (3)
University of Colorado: Ph.D., Geology 1985
University of Colorado: M.Sc., Geology
Albion College: B.A., Geology
Links (2)
Select Recent Media Coverage (10)
The planet passed a dangerous threshold for warming last year. Why is nobody talking about it?
The Boston Globe online
2025-01-05
Julie Brigham-Grette, a professor in the Department of Earth, Geographic and Climate Sciences at UMass Amherst, says our planet passing the dangerous 1.5°C threshold for warming in 2024 for the first time “should start setting off serious alarm bells.”
Scientists warn that a key Atlantic current could collapse, among other climate tipping points
NBC News online
2024-11-12
Julie Brigham-Grette, one of the scientists who contributed to the International Climate Crisis Initiative’s State of the Cryosphere 2024 report released today, says, “The sense of urgency couldn’t be higher … What’s more than ‘urgent?’ ‘Catastrophic?’ We’ve run out of ways to describe it.”
New NSF rule requires tribal approval for research affecting their interests
Science online
2024-08-28
Geologist Julie Brigham-Grette admits she was “an extractive scientist” when she began studying ancient Arctic climates 4 decades ago. She’d fly into the region, collect data, and then return to the University of Massachusetts Amherst to write up her findings. “I might hire someone to take me along the coastline in their boat,” she says, “but I was never taught to involve the local people in anything I was doing.”
The Climate Question Podcast: Why is climate change fuelling tension in the Arctic?
BBC online
2024-02-07
Julie Brigham-Grette is interviewed on a podcast about climate change and tensions in the Arctic. She says reversing the trend of melting sea ice may help to ease tensions among countries vying for control of the Artic. “Sea ice is actually one of the few things that we might be able to bring back,” Brigham-Grette says. “If we can decrease the CO2 enough in the atmosphere and cool the high latitudes, it’s possible, some generations into the future could actually see the sea ice recover, and that would be a remarkable feat of human ingenuity to do that.”
2 degrees, 40 feet: Scientists who study Earth’s ice say we could be committed to disastrous sea level rise
NBC News tv
2023-11-16
“We’re displacing millions of people with the decisions being made now,” said Julie Brigham-Grette, a geosciences professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. More than 60 scientists contributed to the report. Many are experts in their specialties, and some have worked on past reports for the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading body on assessing the climate crisis.
Polar researchers strive for progress despite adverse world events
Nature online
2023-10-11
Like many polar researchers, Julie Brigham-Grette is making up for time lost to the pandemic. In February 2020, within weeks of moving to Germany to begin an eight-month Humboldt Research Fellowship, the COVID-19 outbreak sent her back home to the United States. “Scientists like myself had to sever plans so quickly,” says Brigham-Grette, a geoscientist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in Massachusetts.
What Earth was like last time CO2 levels were so crazily high
Mashable online
2023-04-18
"We, in 150 years, have completely reversed everything the ‘rock thermostat’ has done in the last 3 million years," explained Julie Brigham-Grette. "The transition from a warm Arctic to a cold one that has ice sheets took a million years. We’re jumping out of that in less than 150 years."
Russia’s war in Ukraine forces Arctic climate projects to pivot
Nature online
2022-07-11
“We’re all kind of on hold,” says Julie Brigham-Grette, a geologist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst who established Russian collaborations at the end of the cold war. “We don’t know if Russia will become like North Korea, where there’s very little exchange.”
‘Never Supposed to Happen’: North and South Poles See Unprecedented Heat
VICE online
2022-03-21
Dr. Julie Brigham-Grette, professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst department of geosciences and past chair of the Polar Research Board of the US National Academy of Sciences attributed the warming to the movement of the jet streams: a meandering air current that flows from west to east across the globe. Climate scientists have long posited that a changing climate is making the jet streams “wavier,” bring cold currents southward and warm currents northward. That’s what happened over the weekend, Brigham-Grette said.
NOVA: Polar Extremes
PBS tv
2020-02-05
Julie Brigham-Grette, featured in the NOVA program “Polar Extremes," how ice cores from a frozen lake in northern Russia show how the climate has changed over time. (Segment begins at 1:04:00)
Select Publications (2)
The continued rise in CO2 is unacceptable. This insanity cannot continue
EuronewsJulie Brigham-Grette and Martin Siegert
2023-11-10
Our message — the message of the cryosphere — is that this insanity cannot and must not continue. COP28 and this December must be when we correct course. Some degree of planetary-wide damage from cryosphere loss is already locked in. We must prevent even worse impacts from a collapsing cryosphere for each additional tenth of a degree temperature rise, especially past the “lower” Paris Agreement limit of 1.5°C.
Antarctica is headed for a climate tipping point by 2060, with catastrophic melting if carbon emissions aren’t cut quickly
The ConversationJulie Brigham-Grette and Andrea Dutton
2021-05-17
Julie Brigham-Grette writes: "New research shows it is Antarctica that may force a reckoning between the choices countries make today about greenhouse gas emissions and the future survival of their coastlines and coastal cities, from New York to Shanghai."
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