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Internationally renowned climate change researcher Richard Alley, who has spent three field seasons in Antarctica and five in Greenland, spoke on “Crazy Climate — An Ice Core View of our Future” noon Friday in Van Wickle Hall room 108.
Lunch was provided free of charge to students and for $3 to faculty and staff. The event was part of the Geology Spring Seminar Series sponsored by the geology and environmental geosciences department.
“Richard is part of the team of scientists who discovered that climate has changed abruptly in the recent past,” says Dru Germanoski, professor and head of geology and environmental geosciences. “Previously, earth scientists assumed that climate change must be a slow, steady processRichard is truly a superstar and we are happy he agreed to visit Lafayette.”
Alley has worked on ice cores in Antarctica and the Greenland ice sheet to reconstruct climate change and has worked to use those records to extrapolate future climate change. His book on abrupt climate change, The Two-Mile Time Machine, was the national Phi Beta Kappa Science Award winner for 2001. He chaired a recent National Research Council study on abrupt climate change and has served on many other advisory panels and steering committees. He was invited to breakfast to discuss climate change at the White House and has testified about it before a Senate Committee.
Alley is Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences and an associate of the EMS Environment Institute at Pennsylvania State University, where he teaches and conducts research on the paleoclimatic records, dynamics, and sedimentary deposits of large ice sheets as a means of understanding the climate system and its history and projecting future changes in climate and sea level.
He is a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and has been awarded a Packard Fellowship, a Presidential Young Investigator Award, the Horton Award of the American Geophysical Union Hydrology Section, the Easterbrook Award of the Quaternary Geology and Geomorphology section of Geological Society of America, the Wilson Teaching Award of the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, and the Faculty Scholar Medal of the Pennsylvania State University.
Alley has authored or coauthored more than 135 refereed publications and is a “highly cited” researcher as indexed by ISI. He received his Ph.D. in geology, with a minor in materials science, from University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1987, and earned an M.S. degree (1983) and B.S. degree (1980) in geology from Ohio State University.
Future Geology Spring Seminars include a talk on “Active Tectonism Since 8 Million Years in the Sierra Nevada Basin and Range Transition Zone” noon Friday, April 21, in Van Wickle Hall room 108.
Previous Geology Seminar talks: