CAREER: The Last Glacial Termination in Interior Asia

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The climate event that ended the last ice age - dubbed the "last glacial termination" - involved the greatest natural global warming of the recent geologic past. This was also the last time in which atmospheric CO2 rose by a substantial amount prior to the industrial period. The last glacial termination therefore represents a spectacular natural experiment played out by the Earth system that can be studied in order to decipher the underlying dynamics of the climate system and its sensitivity to forcing factors, such as atmospheric CO2. This project aims to determine when, and how rapidly, glaciers receded and the climate warmed at the end of the last ice age in the heart of Asia - Earth's largest and most populous continent. This research will help identify factors that produced this last great global warming, and to clarify the role of atmospheric CO2 in ice-age climate cycles. This work will provide immersive, field-based, and cooperative educational experiences for the next generation of scientists. The project will bring together a research team that includes underrepresented high-school students and STEM teachers from the South Side of Chicago, graduate and undergraduate students from the U.S.A., Mongolia, and China, and graduate students of science journalism. The overarching goal is to establish and nurture international and cross-cultural educational and scientific partnerships that are built to last well beyond the duration of this project.Identifying the causes of the last glacial termination is a major objective of the earth and climate sciences, and requires detailed chronologies of sensitive paleoclimate proxies that monitored the last glacial-to-interglacial transition across the planet. The purpose of this CAREER research is to develop such chronologies from the center of Asia for the reduction of mountain glacier extent from the peak of the last ice age to today's conditions. Glacier chronologies will be based on precise and accurate 10Be surface-exposure dating of glacial landforms in the mid-latitude Altai range of Mongolia and in the monsoonal eastern Himalaya of China. Glaciological modeling will convert these glacier reconstructions into records of glacier-inferred atmospheric temperature, which will in turn be compared with signatures of incoming solar radiation, greenhouse gases, as well as other proposed drivers, to discriminate among possible causes of the last termination. This project will be carried out following an integrated research and education plan that implements a cooperative, field-based learning strategy in which students at different levels learn by teaching each other. The collaborative, cross-cultural, multi-national, and multi-generational team will share knowledge and experiences in the field and throughout the scientific process. This team will consist of (1) graduate and undergraduate students from the University of Maine, (2) students and researchers from Mongolian and Chinese institutions, (3) students and science teachers from the Gary Comer College Preparatory school ? a public charter school devoted to improving the lives of underserved minority students from the South Side of Chicago, and (4) embedded science journalism graduate students from the Medill School of Journalism who will produce stories for publication and broadcast, thus documenting scientific outcomes for the public.