DRI’s Erick Robinson, Ph.D., associate research professor of climate and archaeology, is co-author on a ground-breaking new study. The research, published May 1st in Nature, is the first global-scale comparison of human resilience to environmental and cultural disturbances over millennia.
The new study helps illuminate how changes in forest composition followed European settlement and natural changes in climate.
An international team of scientists led by DRI found evidence of Southern Hemisphere heavy metal pollution preserved in Antarctic ice cores from early Andean cultures and Spanish Colonial mining that predates the Industrial Revolution by centuries.