Lake E impact breccia core

Wiggles and stacks: Paleoclimate 101

Imagine standing on the top floor of the Empire State Building. Above you, the frigid ice-capped waters of a lake in Siberia. Below you sits nearly a quarter of a mile of lake sediment resting atop impact breccia, a layer of rock formed when a meteorite slammed into Earth 3.6 million years ago. Graph wiggles […]

Julie Brigham-Grette Martin Melles

Inter-hemispheric climate coupling

Laura Nielsen for Frontier Scientists – Paleoclimatology is the study of past climates. One of the many ways to study paleoclimatology is to collect a 2.5 inch [6.6 centimeter] wide tube of mud from a well-situated site. It’s amazing how much we can learn of Earth’s climate past – and what those findings teach us […]

Lake El'gygytgyn satellite space Russia

Data from an impact crater

Laura Nielsen for Frontier Scientists – There’s a place in Northeast Russia where, 3.6 million years ago, a meteorite slammed into Earth. A lake filled the crater. Today, the sediment that has settled at the bottom of Lake El-gygytgyn provides a rare preserved climate record: the longest sediment core record ever collected on land in […]

Big booms over the northland

Ned Rozell for UAFGI – Near a small village in Russia, Marina Ivanova stepped into cross-country skis and kicked toward a hole in the snow. The meteorite specialist with the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and Vernadsky Institute in Moscow was hunting for fragments of the great Chelyabinsk Meteorite that exploded three days earlier. This […]

“This is not what we expected” said Julie Brigham-Grette in video describing work at Lake El’gygytgyn

July 10, 2012– “To this point no one has much of any terrestrial record anywhere in the Arctic older than 125,000 years ago” said Julie Brigham-Grette, University of Massachusetts Amherst as she describes findings from the Lake El’gygytgyn (or Lake E) project to Office of Polar Programs Board Meeting at the National Science Foundation. Brigham-Grette […]

Sunken Treasure under Lake El’gygytgyn

Deep under a frozen lake in Siberia, Russia, lies a researcher’s gold: an astounding record of past climates preserved in untouched layers of lake bed sediment. In 2009 an international team of scientists headed to Lake El’gygytgyn (pronounced El’geegitgin). They perched specialized drilling equipment atop the icy lake surface and drilled down. At the bottom […]

Alutiiq basket weavers share insight with Russian curators

Fairbanks, Alaska, April 24, 2012 – “The Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (MAE) and the Russian Ethnographic Museum in St. Petersburg Russia have the earliest collections of Kodiak baskets, grass and spruce root, in the world,” said Sven Haakanson, executive director of the Alutiiq Museum and Archaeological Repository. In 2010, Haakanson traveled with six Native […]

Alaska dune yields oldest human remains of far north

Ned Rozell for UAFGI – Last summer, archaeologist Ben Potter was supervising a group of researchers digging on an ancient sand dune above the Tanana River. Potter, who had a field camp he needed to start at another site, was anxious to get through the last day of work at the dune. Two graduate students, […]

Weaving In Time – Alutiiq Baskets

Laura Nielsen for Frontier Scientists A row of knotted grass can hold so many stories you’d be amazed. Long grass or spruce root, yarn, sinew, even paint, all go into the baskets lovingly crafted in Alaska. Native Alutiiq weavers have carried on the traditions, but some techniques had been lost. -Had been. In this vodcast by Frontier […]

Weaving in time – Alutiiq baskets

A row of knotted grass can hold so many stories you’d be amazed. Long grass or spruce root, yarn, sinew, even paint, all go into the baskets lovingly crafted in Alaska. Native Alutiiq weavers have carried on the traditions, but some techniques had been lost. -Had been. In this vodcast by Frontier Scientists, learn how […]