William J. D'Andrea | Climate helped drive Vikings from Greenland
Dr. D'Andrea is a NOAA Climate & Global Change Postdoctoral Fellow alumnus (2008-2010), and currently a NSF Office of Polar Programs Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and develops and applies molecular and isotopic techniques to reconstruct past climate change from lake sediments. He studies the natural variability of Earth’s climate system using single-cell algae as an indicator of past temperatures.
Dr. D'Andrea loves the Arctic and worked in southwest Greenland for seven years prior to beginning research in northwest Norway.
In the May 2011 Issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Dr. D'Andrea presented new confirmation of a cooling and starving scenario affecting the Norse farmers. "If summers got shorter and/or colder than the Norse were used to and their hay production was not able to meet their demands—and if this happened over a sustained period of time—it would have been difficult for them to maintain their way of life."
Listen to Billy D'Andrea discuss the challenges, and beauty, of working in Greenland.
Traveling to far-off locations like the Antarctic, The Exploratorium's Ice Stories scientists use Wirecast as a portable broadcast production studio, carrying Wirecast's software on a laptop to remote locations for live webcasts.
