Luther professor and students are continuing their work on a project funded by a $135,000 grant

Luther College assistant professor of environmental studies and chemistry Laura Peterson and several Luther students are continuing work on a project investigating southern hemisphere climate change,

The research, which also involves participants from Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, will continue through 2016.  This spring Jamison Ash, Robbie Helgason, Devon Hovey and Travis Houle, who are students of Peterson, have been constructing a record of climate change from samples taken from the floor of the southwest Pacific Ocean.  Over the summer Hovey and Houle will be joined by fellow Luther student Katherine Huska to continue the research by generating and analyzing sea surface temperature data derived from the same sediment core.

The southern hemisphere, whose climate history has been largely unexplored, is known to play a critical role in important climate and oceanic processes related to carbon cycling and global heat distribution.

Said Peterson, "By looking to the past, we can test our assumptions about how the climate system operates, and potentially uncover new information that we can't directly observe in the present."

The research project is funded by a $135,235 grant from the National Science Foundation.