In A Rapidly Changing World, Greenland’s Real Value Is It’s Ice

The OLLI Distinguished Speakers Series presents
In A Rapidly Changing World, Greenland’s Real Value Is It’s Ice

with Dr. Paul Bierman

Tuesday, April 15, 2025 at 7:00 p.m. ET

Online via Zoom

Today, Greenland and the Arctic are ground-zero for climate change as record global temperatures melt the region’s ice, snow, and sea-ice. In the 1950s and 1960s, the worry wasn’t climate change but the Soviet Union. The Arctic and Greenland’s massive ice sheet were then a focus of US military attention and central to the American Cold War strategy of deterrence and interception. Now, Greenland is back in the news as the new administration has its eyes on the territory.

Let's go back in time and examine Greenland through the lens of both natural and human history – starting with the first people to settle the island about 5000 BCE. I’ll focus on Camp Century, a nuclear-powered US military base inside the Greenland Ice Sheet and the science it catalyzed. The camp was the site of the first ice core ever drilled to the bottom of an ice sheet and the drillers didn’t stop there. They kept going, recovering nearly 12 feet of frozen soil filled with plant and insect fossils – unambiguous evidence that told us when and where Greenland’s ice was gone. 

The massive melt we identified happened about 400,000 years ago, a time when Earth’s climate was naturally about as warm as it is today, but carbon dioxide levels were far lower. When ice on Greenland melts, water flows into the ocean raising sea level as much as 25 feet and flooding coastal zones around the world. When Greenland’s ice is gone, much of Boston and New York will be under water. Greenland’s real value is its ice.

Paul Bierman is geologist by training and a professor in the School of the Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Vermont. His research and teaching expertise focus on the interaction of people and Earth’s dynamic surface with a focus on climate, erosion, and people.

A native of Baltimore, Maryland, he earned a Bachelors degree in Geology at Williams College studying the demise of glaciers as the climate warmed 15,000 years ago. After several years working as an environmental consultant in Boston, he moved to the University of Washington in Seattle where he earned his PhD in Geology; there he was one of the first geologists to develop new dating methods now used to determine Earth’s climate history and the effect of climate on erosion. After a short post-doctoral interlude in Australia, Bierman came to the University of Vermont in 1993.

Bierman’s research has taken him around the globe. In Greenland, he and his graduate students are tracing the comings and goings of Greenland’s ice sheet over the last million years. For the last several years, Bierman has also worked in Cuba with a team of Cuban scientists documenting the effect of the transition to organic agriculture on river water quality. As well, he has studied erosion in Australia, South America, and several countries in Africa and the Middle East. 

Bierman is lead author of two textbooks Geology and the Environment and Key Concepts in Geomorphology. In 2024 he authored, When the Ice is Gone, a deep look into how the US military drove the development of polar and climate science as the Cold War raged and the lessons we continue to learn today from a unique ice core that the army collected in 1996 – the first to penetrate Greenland’s massive ice sheet. Together, Bierman, his students, and collaborators have more than 200 publications in refereed journals and books. He’s won awards from the Geological Society of America for research and from the National Science Foundation for scientific education.

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Ticket information:

Admission is $10 for OLLI at BCC and $15 for the general public.

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