UW-Madison scientist’s study uses ice records to link Industrial Revolution, climate change

In Madison, there are more than 160 years of records on the freezing and thawing dates of lakes Monona and Mendota. But it was centuries of data on a lake in Japan and a river in Finland that helped a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor emeritus and a team of researchers show climate change trends since the Industrial Revolution.John J. Magnuson, the former director of the UW’s Center for Limnology, co-led the study into how records of freezing and thawing dates have changed. The results, published Tuesday in the journal Scientific Reports, showed that “global processes including climate change and variability are driving the long-term changes in ice seasonality.”