H.M.C.CLIMATE SCIENTIST

Politico: How Europeans saw climate change in June (2022)

CNN: Saharan dust turns skies orange over Europe

GlacierHub: New Laser Technology Reveals Climate Change will Induce a Future of Stronger Saharan Dust Storms

"Lead author Heather Clifford explained that the Saharan dust record held inside the Colle Gnifetti ice core revealed that increased dust transport historically occurs when the atmosphere creates high pressure systems over the Mediterranean and drier conditions over North Africa. Climate change models indicate that these conditions will become more vigorous, indicating a dustier future."

The Guardian: Pollution Watch: how much Sahara desert dust do we breathe?

"Saharan dust can have a major effect on weather systems, suppressing hurricane formation and, by darkening snow, bringing forward spring thaws in the Alps. It is unclear if events will increase in the future. A dryer climate in north Africa may lead to more airborne dust but changes in weather patterns may reduce its spread. However, alpine ice cores covering the past two millennia suggests that Saharan dust has increased in the past 100 years. Also notable in the ice core record are the Saharan dust events between 1315 and 1365, a time that includes the Great Famine, when about 10% of Europe’s population perished, and the Black Death. This has led to speculation that poor air quality from Saharan dust may have contributed to a decline in human health and made the population more vulnerable."

Newsweek:'Godzilla' Sahara Dust Cloud Update: Second Wave Set to Reach Gulf Coast

"Recent studies looking at the links between climate change and the transport have produced mixed results, so it is currently not clear whether the recent unusual plume is a "meteorological anomaly," or if such events could become more common as the world warms, Prospero said.Nevertheless, one study published in the journal JGR: Atmospheres indicated that periods of drought in North Africa, which may occur more frequently in future, could be linked to more intense dust plumes."

Scientific American: Saharan Dust Plume Slams U.S., Kicking Up Climate Questions

"One study, published last November in the journal JGR: Atmospheres, suggests more dust has been transported out of the Sahara in the last 100 years than in centuries past. The study also suggests that periods of drought in North Africa, especially in the Sahel region south of the Sahara, are linked to stronger dust events.

Washington Post: ‘Forever chemicals,’ other pollutants found around the summit of Everest

“Clifford took samples of the fresh snow, and one of the samples showed no PFAS; the other a trace. Taken together, the findings suggest that the high levels of PFAS were not from atmospheric deposition. Instead, it appeared that they had been shed from climbers’ outdoor gear such as parkas and tents, which are often treated with chemicals to weatherproof."

National Geographic: How scientists turned the world’s highest mountain into a climate laboratory

"As part of the National Geographic and Rolex Perpetual Planet Everest Expedition, a team of scientists and Sherpa guides sets out to collect information about glacial change in the Himalayas. By extracting ice cores from the highest glacier in the world, the team has begun to uncover details about climate change that have—until now—been hidden in this hard-to-reach ice."

National Geographic: Microplastics found near Everest’s peak, highest ever detected in the world

"Heather Clifford, a climate scientist with the University of Maine, collects stream water south of the Pheriche village in Nepal. It would later be tested for microplastics. The microplastics on Everest are largely made up of polyester, followed by acrylic, nylon, and polypropylene—materials all commonly used in outdoor gear. The plastics were also in greater concentration wherever humans most commonly camp. So even though single-use plastics were recently banned throughout the Khumbu Valley, and the mountaineering community has made progress collecting rubbish from Everest's slopes, microplastics will likely continue to accumulate there."

National Geographic: Everest’s highest glacier has lost 2,000 years of ice in 30 years

Cape Cod Times: Climate scientists go above and beyond

“It was probably my favorite part,” Clifford said of walking around the edges of the icefall taking ice core samples. Glacial peaks, known as penitents, towered 20 feet overhead. Created when the snow goes straight from solid to gas, vaporizing in low humidity and a dew point below freezing, these fields of pinnacles are named for their resemblance to the pointed white hoods worn by Spanish religious orders during Holy Week. “If you are walking through it, it’s as though you are in an ice forest,” said Clifford, who was not part of the climbing expedition."

National Geographic: Graduation Celebration to Remember at Everest Base Camp

"From April to June 2019, an international team of scientists, climbers and storytellers, led by the National Geographic Society and Tribhuvan University and supported in partnership with Rolex, conducted a scientific expedition to Mount Everest. Among this crew were team members Heather Clifford and Laura Mattas who, on their university’s commencement day, celebrated the completion of their degrees with a once-in-a-lifetime graduation ceremony at base camp!"

GQ: Is Your Beloved Outdoors Gear Bad for the Planet?

"In their study, published in ScienceDirect, the researchers concluded that the PFAS particles were being shed by climbers and introduced into the local watershed. In essence, mountaineers were destroying the mountain—poisoning themselves, future hikers, and residents for hundreds of years to come. The culprit was their gear."

Sandwich Enterprise: Sandwich High School Grad Spends Spring On Mt. Everest Studying Climate Change

""My role as a member of the glaciology team was to collect ice, snow, and stream samples to better understand climate, pollution, and atmospheric circulation during the past and present in the Khumbu region,” she said. Ms. Clifford was involved with drilling ice core samples from the Khumbu Glacier, which is next to the Everest Base Camp. The samples were collected over a month-long period."

USAToday: 'Real eye-opener': Microplastic pollution discovered in snow near top of Mount Everest

Business Insider: We've now found microplastics on the very highest and lowest points on Earth. Mount Everest is littered with them.

Guiness World Records: Highest altitude ice core taken

EOS: An Ice Core from the Roof of the World

Science Magazine: Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’

"Mayewski and his interdisciplinary team decided to look for the same eruptions in an ice core drilled in 2013 in the Colle Gnifetti Glacier in the Swiss Alps. The 72-meter-long core entombs more than 2000 years of fallout from volcanoes, Saharan dust storms, and human activities smack in the center of Europe. The team deciphered this record using a new ultra–high-resolution method, in which a laser carves 120-micron slivers of ice, representing just a few days or weeks of snowfall, along the length of the core."

CNN: The worst year to be a human has been revealed by researchers

"By analyzing ice samples from the Colle Gnifetti Glacier in the Swiss Alps, the researchers were able to identify atmospheric pollutants deposited over the past 2,000 years, according to the study, published last week in the journal Antiquity. Substances found in the ice provide evidence that the eruption took place in Iceland, not California, as suggested by previous research."

TIME: Scientists Have Identified the Actual Worst Year in History. And No, It's Not 2018

"The study, published in Antiquity, analyzes glacial ice from the Swiss Alps for evidence of atmospheric change and its effect on the financial landscape of early Europe, confirming scientists’ understanding of the unfortunate circumstances of 536 and subsequent economic and social shifts."

The Smithsonian Magazine: The Fallout of a Medieval Archbishop’s Murder Is Recorded in Alpine Ice

"Nearly a millennium later, samples retrieved from a glacier in the Swiss Alps have revealed evidence of the squabble that hastened Becket’s demise: a plunge in the production of lead borne out by the fallout between the church and the crown, which refused to support religious construction projects unless the archbishop accepted the king’s supremacy. After Becket’s murder, the ice reveals, lead use rose sharply again, testifying to Henry’s hasty scramble to redeem himself through the construction of a series of major monastic institutions."

BBC: Thomas Becket: Alpine ice sheds light on medieval murder

Ancient air pollution, trapped in ice, reveals new details about life and death in 12th Century Britain. In a study, scientists have found traces of lead, transported on the winds from British mines that operated in the late 1100s. Air pollution from lead in this time period was as bad as during the industrial revolution centuries later. The pollution also sheds light on a notorious murder of the medieval era; the killing of Thomas Becket.

Washington Post: Catastrophic effect of 1918 flu may have been aided by peculiar influx of cold air into Europe during WWI

"In a paper published last month in the journal GeoHealth, scientists analyzed the effects of an extreme weather anomaly they said set the stage for increased casualties during World War I and the spread and intensity of the flu afterward. Using an ice core from the Alps and other climate records, they found evidence of an abnormal influx of cold air into Europe between 1914 and 1919. As a result, temperatures plunged and rain flooded battlefields. The war contributed to the terrible weather, they said: The dust and explosives generated in battle probably cooled the local atmosphere and prompted precipitation."

CNN: How environmental conditions like cold and wet weather can affect pandemics, and what that means for COVID-19

"The researchers discovered that lingering cold, wet weather during the winters of 1915, 1916 and 1918 was caused by abnormally high rushes of marine air from the North Atlantic. Deaths in Europe peaked three times during World War I and all the spikes occurred during or soon after heavy rain and cold weather, according to the study."

Forbes: Climate Study Suggests Weather Anomaly Worsened World War I And The 1918 Flu Pandemic

"Studying an ice core from the European Alps, the researchers reconstructed the climate conditions from 1914 to 1919 over Central Europe. Unusually strong influxes of cold marine air from the North Atlantic, primarily between 1915 and 1919, resulted in unusually strong precipitation events, forming a recognizable peak of chloride- and sodium-rich dust in some layers of the studied ice core."

ScienceMag: World’s oldest ice core could solve mystery of ‘flipped’ ice age cycles

"In some ways, drilling into Antarctica’s ancient ice is easier than interpreting it. Today, more than 2 years after presenting the discovery of the world’s oldest ice core, scientists have published an analysis of the 2.7-million-year-old sample. One surprising finding: Air bubbles from 1.5 million years ago—from a time before the planet’s ice age cycles suddenly doubled in length—contain lower than expected levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), a possible clue to the shift in the ice age cycle."

Forbes: Two Million-Year-Old Gas Bubbles Reveal The Role Of Greenhouse Gases In Earth’s Atmosphere

"In a paper published in the journal Nature, a group of scientists used air trapped in the bubbles in ice as old as 2 million years to reconstruct levels of carbon-dioxide and methane in Earth's atmosphere. This is the first time scientists were able to study an ice core that old. The record-shattering 200 meters (656 ft) long ice core was recovered in 2015-16 in the Allan Hills of Antarctica."

EOS: Antarctic Ice Cores Offer a Whiff of Earth’s Ancient Atmosphere

"Yan and his colleagues drilled into “blue ice,” a rare type of ice that’s been compressed over time. Scientists value it because it’s often very old, even when relatively near the surface. In the Allan Hills, blue ice is being pushed toward a mountain and is slowly uplifting, Yan said. “What used to be buried very deep…is progressively getting closer to the surface.” At the same time, strong winds ablate the ice from the top, progressively removing younger material"