Aboard a vintage Korean War-era C-130 cargo plane, Paul Bierman ’85 sat in a seat made of bright orange netting on the aircraft’s metal flooring, staring out a small porthole window, eager for his first glimpse of the island he’d long studied but never seen. It was 2008, and Bierman, a professor of environmental science at the University of Vermont (UVM), was on his first trip to Greenland.

He and a team of researchers were heading to one of only two ice sheets in the world. Bierman’s anticipation grew as the plane flew low over a deep fjord, revealing towering cliffs and glaciers on either side, leaving the team speechless.

“I see one iceberg and then another, and then the edge of Greenland,” Bierman says. “I had never seen an ice sheet until we flew in that first time. My jaw just dropped.”

The team sampled rocks around the edge of the ice sheet to understand when and how it had begun to erode. Since then, Bierman has expanded his study from dating rocks to include human-induced landscape change and the importance of ice cores (cylindrical samples of ice drilled from glaciers or ice sheets) to understand past climate changes and make more accurate climate predictions. His forthcoming book, When the Ice Is Gone (W.W. Norton & Co.), explores the history of ice coring and the groundbreaking discoveries made from a U.S. military base in Greenland that have revealed crucial information about global warming trends.

The inspiration for the book and the relationships that have guided Bierman’s research all trace back to Williams. As an undergraduate, Bierman developed a strong interest in glacial geology and environmental science. Over time, he formed a close relationship with David Dethier, the Edward Brust Professor of Geology and Mineralogy, Emeritus, at Williams. Dethier was Bierman’s mentor and helped him shape these interests into his senior thesis about the history of deglaciation (ice sheet melting and retreat) in northwestern Massachusetts.

“His pursuit of how geologic thought evolved in Massachusetts produced wonderful insights for his thesis,” says Dethier, who has since published more than a dozen research papers with Bierman.

After briefly considering a career in medicine, Bierman joined the UVM faculty in 1993. There he established a chemistry laboratory, now supported as a Community Facility by the National Science Foundation, where students from around the world have the space and resources to process their own samples. Over the next two decades, he and his students surveyed land from Australia and Vermont to Canada and Greenland to understand how, where, and how quickly materials can erode from Earth’s surface.

Through it all, Bierman maintained his connection to Williams. Several of Bierman’s UVM students have worked on their theses using Williams’ Environmental Analysis Lab, which assists students and faculty with the analysis of environmental samples. Bierman’s oldest daughter, environmental studies major Marika Massey-Bierman ’23, also spent four years working in the lab, which lecturer Jay Racela supervises.

And alongside his former student Chris Halsted, now a visiting geosciences professor at Williams, Bierman established a summer research program enabling Williams students to visit UVM and participate in advanced lab geochemistry. Bierman says these kinds of collaborations between faculty and students are unique to Williams.

“There’s something about the faculty connection with students at Williams, and I can’t put my finger on it, but it has certainly shaped my teaching, mentoring, and research,” he says.

In 2021, Bierman and an international team of researchers, including Dethier, published a seminal study that revealed well-preserved plant fossils from Greenland’s ice sheet. The team made this discovery using soil samples initially collected in the 1960s from Camp Century, a U.S. military base built within the Greenland ice sheet during the Cold War. Initially intended as an Arctic research center, the base ultimately served to drill ice cores.

“They drilled through a kilometer of ice and took about three and a half meters of material from below the ice sheet,” Bierman says. “No one had ever done this before, no one had ever gotten through an ice sheet, and no one had ever collected anything from the bottom.”

At some point, for myriad potential reasons that Bierman elaborates in his book, the deepest of the Camp Century ice cores went missing. They were presumed lost for decades until Danish researchers went looking for them in 2019 and ultimately found they’d been stored in a freezer in Copenhagen.

When the researchers examined sediment from the bottom of the core, they confirmed that Greenland’s ice sheet melted naturally, at least once before, under warm climate conditions and during a time when the world didn’t have as many people or as much infrastructure as it has now. Their findings beg the question: If the ice sheet could melt under natural climate change conditions, what disruptions could lie ahead due to our current climate?

As Bierman explains, when an ice sheet melts, its reflective white surface is replaced by darker rocks that absorb more sunlight, creating a feedback loop that accelerates global warming. This process contributes to higher temperatures and raises sea levels. According to estimates, Bierman says that if Greenland’s ice sheet were to melt completely, global sea levels could rise by roughly 24 feet, completely submerging coastal cities like New York, Boston, or Mumbai, drastically altering coastlines and flooding major urban areas.

Bierman’s research highlights how our actions can improve or worsen future climate outcomes. This theme carries through When the Ice is Gone in ways Dethier says are critical to our understanding of global climate change.

“Paul’s book is notable for its synthesis of revelations about Greenland, both things we had forgotten, and, more broadly, the remarkable changes (almost all of them negative) that are so rapidly taking place in Greenland in response to global climate change,” says Dethier.

Still, Bierman says he carefully avoided writing “another climate change book of doom and gloom.” Instead, he hopes his latest work will inspire ingenuity.

“I hope [readers] see this almost as a call to action that says, let’s save this ice sheet, and that by saving the ice sheet, we can maybe, in some ways, save the world.”

Read coverage about a new study co-written by Paul Bierman ’85 and Chris Halsted, visiting professor of geosciences, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on Vermont Public, Grist.org and The Conversation. 

Photo, at top: The research team’s first campsite in Greenland overlooking the ice sheet. Paul Bierman/University of Vermont; Photo, above: Paul Bierman ’85 collects samples from rocky outcrops smoothed by now-vanished ice in southern Greenland. Josh Brown/University of Vermont. 

Queen Muse is a writer and communications leader based in Philadelphia, Pa. She writes for many news publications and university magazines, and she crafts effective communication strategies for organizations across various sectors.