Digging for Research Gold

With climate change threatening the planet’s future, a UB-led research team is looking to the past for answers.

Along the steep walls of a gold mine deep in the Alaskan interior, a University at Buffalo-led research team is digging, picking and scraping its way past petrified trees and fossilized mammoth bones buried in the ancient sediment. The treasure they’re after? Dirt.

But not your typical garden-variety dirt. Within the chemical makeup of this stuff is crucial information about the region’s prehistoric climate—information that could help researchers and policymakers understand how Alaska might respond to climate change in coming years.

Miners’ loess is geologists’ gain

Ancient creeks once flowed in the mines where the scientists are collecting samples, leaving behind deposits of gravel containing gold. Today, that gravel is buried under hundreds of feet of windblown silt, called loess, which originates in nearby mountains when glaciers crush rock into dust.

Miners must excavate these giant mounds of silt to access their precious quarry. But to the researchers, the enormous trenches the miners carve deep into the landscape to do so are of even greater value.

A window to the past, a glimpse into the future

Over millions of years, cyclical climate patterns driven by changes in the Earth’s orbit caused glaciers in Alaskan mountains to grow and shrink. More loess was deposited in cold times, and less in warm times, ultimately creating a geologic timeline of strata, like rings in a tree trunk.

During a summer trip to Alaska, the team carefully measured out sections of sediment and removed them for study. Back in the lab, they’ll analyze various compounds in the dirt to build a picture of prehistoric climate trends.

“By studying how the climate in this region behaved in really warm periods in the past, we can make better predictions about the future,” says UB geologist and lead researcher Elizabeth Thomas, noting that the findings can’t come soon enough. “Alaska is experiencing rapid climate change right now.”