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A melting glacier collapsed, sending the mountaintop it propped up careening into the Dickson Fjord in East Greenland. The impact created a 650-foot tall tsunami, which crashed back and forth between the steep channel walls. Tyler Jones puts the event into the context of arctic climate change.

“We’re creating a world where these ice sheets are going to melt,” says Tyler Jones, explaining the results of a new study on fossilized plant and insect parts found at the bottom of Greenland's ice sheet.

Glacial ice contains valuable data about climates past. Researchers like Tyler Jones are working to preserve those records for the future. A number of science teams are archiving ice cores in a remote cave in Antarctica, where the average temperature is -54 degrees Celsuis (-65 degrees Fahrenheit).

Tyler Jones, Brad Markle, and Valerie Morris are leading a group of students in resampling the Greenland Ice Sheet Project Two (GISP2) core to investigate mechanisms of abrupt climate change and extreme events of the past. The original measurements (e.g., water isotopes) numbered a few thousand while the new measurements will create millions of data points.

For the second summer in a row, the CU �鶹ӰԺ Division of Public Safety's Flight Operations department is supporting important campus research in Alaska, as part of the Navigating the New Arctic project (principal investigator: Tyler Jones), which is being managed by researchers in the Stable Isotope Lab of INSTAAR.

The Far North is thawing, unleashing clouds of planet-heating gas. Tyler Jones, Bruce Vaughn, and Kevin Rozmiarek use detectors on drones or carried by hand to measure methane release from permafrost in Alaska.

Researchers led by INSTAAR Tyler Jones used ice core data to reconstruct seasonal temperatures throughout the Holocene. The results link especially hot summers with patterns in Earth’s orbit. The results are the first seasonal temperature record stretching back 11,000 years.

By analyzing Antarctic ice cores, CU �鶹ӰԺ scientists and an international team of collaborators have revealed the most detailed look yet at the �鶹ӰԺ recent climactic history, including summer and winter temperatures dating back 11,000 years to the beginning of what is known as the Holocene. Published today in Nature, the study is the very first seasonal temperature record of its kind, from anywhere in the world. INSTAAR Tyler Jones is lead author of the study.

Core libraries store a treasure trove of data about the �鶹ӰԺ past. What will it take to sustain their future?

A new INSTAAR-led project will engage Indigenous and Western knowledge systems to better understand abrupt permafrost change in Alaska. The National Science Foundation selected the project as part of its Navigating the New Arctic funding area, one of ten “Big Ideas” that NSF is investing in as an area of profound national challenge and opportunity. The research project brings Alaskan communities together with social and natural scientists to examine changes in permafrost thaw lake environments, including associated effects on villages in the Yukon River watershed.