I made this movie to visually demonstrate the dramatic decrease in Arctic sea ice happening right now. When I was born, in 1979, the minimum summer sea ice extent in the Arctic was about 17,000 cubic kilometers. In 2012, it was less than 5,000 cubic kilometers. The red points show weekly estimates of sea ice […]

Graduate student assistantship at the University of Alaska Fairbanks A graduate student assistantship is available in the laboratory of Dr. Eric Collins at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (http://www.reric.org). Contact Dr. Collins (student-app@reric.org) to discuss the position in more detail. Please include a brief description of your research interests, experience, and academic preparations. Competitive applicants […]

I’ve just returned from the IPY2012 conference in Montréal, which was a very interesting mix of science, culture, and politics. On the Science side, there were lots of great presentations wrapping up years of polar research. I spent a lot of time in the Polar Microbes, Polar Marine Ecosystems, and Polar Terrestrial Ecosystems sessions, but […]

I’ve made a short video teaser for my upcoming talk at the IPY2012 conference in Montreal. Check it out! [It took me all day to find the right combination of tools to produce this simple video in Linux! First I tried making it as a presentation in OpenOffice Impress, exporting that as a swf video […]

I was delighted to give the first Evolution, Ecology, and Behaviour (EEB) seminar of the term today in the Biology Department at McMaster. I talked mostly about sea ice microorganisms and finished with a few slides for a paper that I have been working on with Paul Higgs on modeling bacterial pangenomes. The slides are […]