After President-elect Trump's comments about taking control of Greenland and the Panama Canal, Professor Amanda Lynch sat down for an interview with NPR's Leila Fadel to discuss the impact of climate change on these important trade routes.

Ice sheet melt has been shown to increase volcanic activity in subglacial volcanoes elsewhere on the globe. DEEPS PhD candidate Allie Coonin and her team ran 4,000 computer simulations to study how ice sheet loss affects Antarctica’s buried volcanoes, and they found that gradual melt could increase the number and size of subglacial eruptions.

Professor Amanda Lynch, who has studied climate change in the Arctic for nearly 30 years, spoke to the New York Times about president-elect Trump's calls to acquire Greenland and the Panama Canal. She notes that the new trade routes created by ice melt could heighten the risk of environmental disasters. “An oil spill or some other toxic accident on that route is inevitable and could already have happened and we just don’t know it,” she said.