Abrupt Climate Change:
Past and Present

Ice cores and permafrost.

Dr. Tyler R. Jones

Assistant Research Professor
Fellow, INSTAAR
SIL Leadership Team
tyler.jones@colorado.edu

I am really passionate about understanding abrupt climate change and other mechanisms of the climate system that relate to society. I am a polar scientist focusing on ice sheets and permafrost. I have spent over a year of my life living in remote field camps on the Greenland ice sheet, on sailboats in the Arctic Ocean near Spitsbergen, in cabins in Alaskan permafrost-areas, or in other glaciated and high-alpine places.

I love to mix science with outreach. I spent 10 years at an Emmy-award winning documentary film company learning the importance of storytelling. I feel like cultures, traditions, and practices all stem from storytelling, and science is no different. A good story can change the world. Recently, I have taken part in artist residency programs, given public lectures about "the entire climate history of Earth", or volunteered in climate-policy positions.

My favorite quote: "Greatness is not what you have. It’s what you give. It’s what you leave behind."

Favorite food: A tie between sushi, ramen, and pho.

Favorite aspect of academics: Helping graduate students become great scientists and storytellers. I love one-on-one work sessions. I also love walking meetings. I often have my biggest intellectual breakthrough when I am outside in nature.

In another life: If I wasn't a scientist, I would be a pottery maker down a long dirt road in the Lofoten Islands, right next to the sea.

Current favorite books: 1) Eruption: The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens by Steve Olson. 2) The Last Season by Eric Blehm. 3) Eating to Extinction: The World's Rarest Foods and Why We Need to Save Them by Dan Saladino. 4) The Physics of Glaciers by Kurt M. Cuffey and W. S. B. Paterson.

Best opening line of a book: Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

My research group studies abrupt climate change (or the potential for it) through the lens of science, society, and culture. Our current focus areas are Alaska, Greenland, and Antarctica.

In Alaska, we study the changing landscape and hotspot-methane emissions in permafrost-thaw regions. We work with Indigenous communities in the Yukon River Watershed to better understand how to 'navigate the new Arctic', or in other words, to be prepared for the future ahead.

In Greenland and Antarctica, we recover ice cores from remote field camps to reconstruct past climates extending back 100s of thousands of years. Our ice core records span the last glacial-interglacial cycle. We are particularly interested in understanding abrupt climate changes of the past, that is, climate change that occurred within years to decades and had a substantial impact regionally or globally.

We also fly drones (multi-rotor and fixed wing) to sample atmospheric air for varying analyses in the lowest 2,000 meters of the atmosphere. In Greenland, we measure stable water isotopes in vapor. In Alaska, we measure carbon isotopes of methane. These measurements are used to improve isotope-enabled models of the hydrologic and carbon cycles, which provide us with valuable insights about future climate change.

Our team is actively involved in science communication through film, photography, art, and public speaking, or through task forces or environmental-policy boards.

Nord Is: Official Selection of the Polar Film Fest 2020 at the Explorer's Club in New York City, and featured at the Re/Call art exhibit at the Rocky Mountain Land Library. The film was edited by CU students and produced and filmed by Tyler!

Follow Tyler Jones through the labs and living spaces of an ice-core science camp atop the Greenland ice sheet. Tyler spent the 2011 and 2012 field seasons at the NEEM ice core camp in northwest Greenland, where he assisted with the drilling and processing of the deep ice core.

GISP2 ice core resample

The GISP2 ice core was drilled at the Summit of the Greenland ice sheet in the late 1980s to early 1990s. One of the original measurements performed on the ice core was water isotopes at ~1 meter resolution. Water isotopes are a proxy for local temperature and regional atmospheric circulation. Our team is funded to resample GISP2 ice, currently stored at the National Science Foundation-Ice Core Facility (NSF-ICF), to about ~1 mm resolution. For the full core, the resolution will increase from about 3,000 data points to millions of data points. We currently have a team of 3 undergradudate students, 2 PhD students, and a number of senior personnel working on the project. From Summer 2024 to Fall 2025, we will both re-cut ice using bandsaws at the NSF-ICF freezer (-25 degrees C, burrrrr!) and remeasure ice for water isotopes at INSTAAR, University of Colorado.

EGRIP ice core camp, Greenland

Our team has spent four summers at the EGRIP ice core camp in northeast Greenland. We used a field deployable cavity ring-down spectroscopy instrument with continuous flow capabilities to analyze water isotopes of ice for the last 125,000 years. The water isotopes are a proxy for local temperature and regional atmospheric circulation. We are investigating how high-frequency climate signals (interannual to decadal scales) change across Dansgaard-Oeschger (D-O) Cycles. D-O Events are the term used for very large, abrupt warming events in Greenland during the last glacial period.

Goldstream Valley, Alaska

Our team deployed to Alaska in 2022 - 2024 to measure permafrost methane emissions in the area of Big Trail Lake, north of Fairbanks. This is an intensive study site, and we are bringing new landscape-scale measurement techniques to reconcile bottom-up and top-down estimates of methane flux to better understand radiative forcing. We use two new technologies: a fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial System with a custom methane sensor fitted into the nose cone, and a dual-comb spectroscopy instrument capable of multi-kilometer open-path measurements of methane. We are also measuring carbon isotopes of methane and performing incubation experiments of soil in conjunction with Sandia Labs to improve biogeochemical modeling frameworks.

INSTAAR Drone Program

Our team has flown drones over the Greenland Ice Sheet and over permafrost regions of Alaska. Our goal is to understand boundary layer processes and interactions with the free troposphere for research focused on the hydrologic and carbon cycles. Our Unmanned Aerial System includes custom sampling pods that fit within the nose cone of a fixed-wing drone. We are constantly developing new capabilities and methodologies through collaborations with academic groups, private industry, non-profits, and government labs.

NEEM ice core camp, northwest Greenland. The black geodesic dome sits on skis, and can by pulled across the ice sheet to each new ice-core project location. Currently, the dome sits in northeast Greenland at the EGRIP camp. Flags line the "main street", representing each nation that has a scientist or technician in camp.

An international team of ice core scientists - including three people from INSTAAR (Tyler Jones; Will Skorski, prior M.Sc. student; Abby Hughes, prior Ph.D. student) - celebrating the discovery of an ancient volcanic ash layer from the last glacial period in the EGRIP ice core.

The INSTAAR drone team has flown custom fixed-wing drones over permafrost in Alaska (pictured) and snow on the Greenland Ice Sheet. Our goal is to understand boundary layer processes (in the lower few kilometers of the atmosphere) and interactions with the free troposphere for research focused on the hydrologic and carbon cycles. L to R: Bruce Vaughn, Tyler Jones, Kevin Rozmiarek (current Ph.D. student), Eli Miller (current Ph.D. student), and Valerie Morris.

Pulling a custom-made laser spectroscopy instrument across the surface of Big Trail Lake, Alaska in March 2023. The instrument was used to measure methane concentrations, and we identified a number of hotspot emission locations where large methane plumes (invisible to the naked eye) had found a pathway out of the snow and ice. L to R: Chloe Brashear (prior M.Sc. student), Tyler Jones

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