University of Nevada assistant professor Sudeep Chandra and Joanne Heslop, who is one of Chandra’s students, headed to the Siberian Arctic last week to study how the thawing Pleistocene epoch carbon deposits are affecting climate changes.  The two join researchers and students from all over the world who have come together to work on the Polaris Project.

The Polaris Project, which has received $1.6 million in grant money from the National Science Foundation, trains future leaders in Arctic research along with educating the general public on how global warming in the Arctic has an impact on the region and the rest of the world.

Chandra says that the fact that the Arctic is more sensitive to climate change and the region’s ice melting is acting as a warning of climate change was evident to him when he made his first trip to the Siberian Arctic last summer to conduct field work for the project.

“You know how you conjure up this image that the Arctic is going to be freezing? We had multiple days of 80-degree and higher temperatures,” he said. “There were days when it was so hot, I wore shorts. You could see all these ancient bones of mammoths poking out of the soil because the ice is melting all around them.”

“It made me realize with a strong passion that my students here at the University of Nevada need to be informed about this data so they, as active citizens, can use this to influence U.S. policy makers in their decision-making,”

In order to help inform his students, he gives one of them the chance to experience climate change in the Arctic first hand.

Joanne Heslop, this year’s student, is excited to be working on the Polaris Project where she will get a chance to see first hand what she has learned in Chandra’s Natural Resources and Environmental Science 211 class.

“There is carbon that has been frozen in the tundra since the Pleistocene era,” she said. “As it thaws, it falls into lakes and rivers, so we will be looking at how that influences the carbon cycle system.”