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 climate evolution in the Arctic.
Expertise (10)
Polar climate
Arctic Science
Climate Change
Sedimentology
Glaciology
Stratigraphy
Geological Mapping
Chronology of Geologic Systems
Arctic
Polar Science
Biography
Julie Brigham-Grette is an internationally-renowned expert on climate evolution in the Arctic. 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 I 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.
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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 Media Coverage (5)
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)
Vanishing Arctic ice will open the way for more science voyages, analysis suggests
Science Magazine print
2019-08-12
“The overall picture is mixed,” says Julie Brigham-Grette, a geologist at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. “We’re opening up an entire environment that has otherwise been cut off from human influence.”
Select Publications (1)
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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