Understanding the recent history of vanishing ice caps allows us to predict the timing of their disappearance, place their demise into a longer-term context, and quantify recent climate cooling during the little ice age.

By obtaining lake sediment cores, which are continuous and datable archives of paleoclimate information, we can investigate recent environmental change and learn about what our world was like in its pristine, pre-industrial state.

Studying the history of glaciers from place to place across the globe allows us to reconstruct Ice Age climate change, which provides insights into the Earth's climate system on timescales longer than can be determined from current and historical climate monitoring.

Understanding the behavior of past ice sheets can help us better understand the ice sheet processes that occur today in Greenland and Antarctica, the locations of Earth's presently existing ice sheets that play a critical role in our climate system.

Glacier history and dynamics research takes advantage of the department's new state-of-the-art cosmogenic radionuclide preparation facility.