Climate Researcher Richard Alley To Speak At Convocation posted 11/2/07

ADRIAN, Mich. – Richard Alley, a professor of geosciences at Penn State University, is scheduled to speak Wednesday, Nov. 14, at 12 P.M. in the Dawson Auditorium. He is one of the world’s leading climate researchers and is the author of the book The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future.

In the 1990s, Alley and his colleagues made headlines with the discovery that the last ice age came to an abrupt end over a period of only three years. They found a two-mile long ice core which was pulled up from the center of Greenland. It contained bubbles of air that reveal what the Earth's atmosphere was like over a period of 100,000 years. The ice core showed that at one point, in as little as 10 years, the global climate had drastically changed. Soon after that discovery, climate change became a personal crusade for Alley.

Dr. Alley is currently interested in researching ice sheets and climates. His topics of exploration include the following: interpretation of paleoclimatic records from ice cores, abrupt climate changes, physical properties of ice cores, ice-sheet collapse and sea-level change, and erosion and sedimentation by ice sheet.

Dawson Auditorium is located off of Charles Street on the Adrian College campus. This event is free and open to the public.