Nicolás Young studies glaciers and ice sheets, and how they’ve changed in the past. His work earned him a Blavatnik Regional Award for Young Scientists last fall, which came with a $30,000 prize. You can hear him talk about his research in this new video, produced by the Blavatnik Family Foundation.
The awards, established in 2007, honor the achievements of young scientists who work in New York, New Jersey or Connecticut. They’re intended to encourage the researchers early in their careers. Young was a postdoctoral research scholar at the time he won the award; now he’s an assistant research professor at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. He was one of three winners and six finalists in 2015.
Young focuses on glaciers and paleoclimate—that is, he’s interested in reconstructing how mountain glaciers and ice sheets changed through time. He’s particularly focused on Greenland.
“The Greenland ice sheet is particularly important because moving forward, it’s going to be one of the main contributors to global sea level rise,” Young says in the video. “So by studying the past evolution of the ice sheet, we hope to better predict how much the ice sheet will melt in the future, and specifically, how much sea level rise it will contribute to the global oceans.”
Lamont science writer Stacy Morford wrote in detail about Young’s work in this piece last October.
