Experts are in Norman this week to talk about their research in the Arctic and Antarctic, research that shows some of the first indicators of climate change.

Researchers will talk about climate change at the poles 7 p.m. today at Polar-Palooza, a multi-media presentation at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History on the University of Oklahoma Campus. The event is free and open to the public.

The five presenters in town for what they described as a “traveling scientific road show” sat down to a luncheon Monday and answered reporters’ questions about their work and today’s presentation.

One of the ideas behind the tour, however, is to provide a place for the public to meet directly with the scientists studying climate change, instead of just getting the information from the media or politicians.

About 40 experts will take part in the international tour, but because of tight research schedules they’ll be rotated in and out. The visit is part of a national tour organized by Passport to Knowledge and made possible by the National Science Foundation and NASA.

The presenters in Norman will include Atsuhiro Muto, a Ph.D student in the geography department at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He recently returned from one of the longest single season traverses of Antarctica where he measured temperatures of the ice sheet to learn about the continent’s climate over the past 1,000 years.

Sean Topkok also will present. He is an Alaskan native and an indigenous curriculum specialist with the Alaska Native Knowledge Network.

Kathy Licht, associate professor of earth sciences at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis, also will present. This is her fourth stop on the Polar-Palooza tour, and she said students, teachers and the general public have received the presentation well.

“People are really interested. They ask good questions,” she said.

She recently finished her third trip to Antarctica where she studied the past effects of glaciers on the landscape to try to determine what may happen in the future.

The ice at the poles can tell a lot about the future, because what happened before can happen again, said Julie Brigham-Grette, professor of geosciences at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Brigham-Grette also was in town to present at Polar-Palooza. She has been doing research in the Arctic for nearly 29 years, including eight field seasons in remote parts of northeast Russia. She studies sediment to determine glacial changes over time, which can reveal how sea ice may change in the future based on current climate change.

George Divoky, Ph.D research associate at the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, also will present today. He has been studying seabirds on an island in Arctic Alaska since 1970, and in that role has seen the birds go through many changes as their climate has changed rapidly.

Windstorms have increased that prevent the young birds from surviving, polar bears have entered the island in search of food and the warming temperatures have destroyed the layer of permafrost that used to cover the island. Now the island is eroding during the summer and probably won’t even exist in 15 years, Divoky said.

The life of this obscure seabird on a small island in the Arctic might not seem that interesting to most people, but Divoky’s research has other implications. What’s going on at the poles is a harbinger of what’s to come, he said.

Life at the poles takes place at a delicate balance near freezing temperatures. Things change immensely when it’s just a few degrees warmer or cooler because that means the difference between ice and water, Divoky said. So the poles can show the first effects of global warming.

One such effect is that mathematical models predict the sea level will rise by 1 meter in the next 100 years, Brigham-Grette said. One in six people on the planet live within 1 meter of sea level, she said.

“The consequences of that, the cost of that has not been revealed,” she said.

Scientists agree that global warming is happening, and nearly all agree it can be attributed to human causes, Licht said.

“That’s not the question,” she said. “The question is how are we going to deal with that in the future.”

The earth does go through cyclical changes, but the changes it’s going through now are very unusual, she said.

“It’s the rate of change that’s surprising — so fast,” she said. The scientists don’t know everything, but there’s enough information to act on, she said.

Brigham-Grette said Polar-Palooza will show the changes the climate is facing, but it isn’t all “doom and gloom.”

“There are ways of adapting, but we have to be smart,” she said. “… Business as usual is going to have consequences.”

Julianna Parker366-3541jparker@normantranscript.com