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RESEARCHERS GATHER TO DISCUSS ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGECOLUMBUS, Ohio -- The evidence is mounting: Earth’s climate has changed abruptly at times throughout its 4-billion-year history. The American Geophysical Union Chapman Conference on Abrupt Climate Change will take place on the Ohio State campus from June 15-19, 2009. Topics will range from climate models, paleoceanography, and ocean circulation to ice sheet dynamics as researchers try to decipher the climate-tipping points that have driven past civilizations to collapse.
Even the most sudden climate shifts have left behind chemical signatures in ice cores, deep marine sediments, corals, and other climate archives from around the globe, explained conference organizer Harunur Rashid, Byrd Research Fellow at Ohio State’s Byrd Polar Research Center. But combining these diverse climate records into one coherent picture of Earth’s climate is extremely difficult. “We’ll discuss existing climate records, strategize about how to acquire new records, and set research priorities,” Rashid said. “Hosting the Chapman Conference gives us a unique opportunity to gather the world’s experts across many climate disciplines into one auditorium -- that rarely occurs in any other venue.” The conference will host up to 150 participants from at least nine countries around the world. Speakers include Richard Alley, a glaciologist and expert on climate history at Penn State; Jeanne Lynch-Stieglitz, a paleoceanographer at Georgia Tech; and Ohio State’s own Lonnie Thompson, whose work has revealed the dramatic melting of mountaintop ice around the globe. On Wednesday, June 17, researchers and reporters will attend a half-day field trip to the Laurentide Ice Sheet Margin, to see how ice carved the earth some 20,000 years ago. For a complete list of speakers and abstracts, see http://www.agu.org/meetings/chapman/2009/ccall/. # Contact: Lynn Everett, (614)292-9909; Everett.2@osu.edu Written by Pam Frost Gorder, (614) 292-9475; Gorder.1@osu.edu |
