Arctic Icebreaker Reception and Nye Lecture
AGU Fall Meeting
Tuesday, 14 December 2004
San Francisco, California
Marriott Hotel - Yerba Buena Ballroom Salon 9
For more information you may contact any of the following people from
the sponsoring organizations:
Mark Williams, CSFG markw [at] snobear.colorado.edu ( )
Wendy Warnick, ARCUS warnick [at] arcus.org
Carl Benson, AINA benson [at] gi.alaska.edu
Larry Hinzman, USPA ffldh [at] uaf.edu
Brian Barnes, UAF-IAB ffbmb [at] uaf.edu
General information about the Fall Meeting of AGU is available at:
http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm04/
You are invited to attend an Arctic Icebreaker Reception hosted by the
Arctic Research Consortium of the United States (ARCUS), the Arctic
Institute of North America (AINA), the AGU Cryosphere Scientific Focus
Group (CSFG), the U.S. Permafrost Association (USPA), and the University
of Alaska Fairbanks Institute of Arctic Biology (UAF-IAB), at the Fall
Meeting of AGU in San Francisco.
The Icebreaker Reception and Nye Lecture will take place on Tuesday, 14
December 2004. The schedule is as follows:
5:15 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.
Nye Lecture by Richard Alley
6:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.
Jointly Sponsored Reception
Both events will be in the Yerba Buena Ballroom Salon 9 at the San
Francisco Marriott located at 55 Fourth Street.
The reception will include hot and cold hors d'oeuvres and a no host
bar, in addition to the third annual Nye Lecture, to be presented by
Richard Alley from Pennsylvania State University.
ARCUS and AINA jointly sponsor receptions at major arctic meetings,
including AGU, to provide a place where hundreds of people with arctic
interests can find each other amidst the thousands. The following
organizations have recently become sponsors as well:
2002 - U.S. Permafrost Association
2003 - AGU Cryosphere Scientific Group
2004 - Institute of Arctic Biology, University of Alaska Fairbanks
Third annual Nye Lecture
Richard Alley from Pennsylvania State University
"We're All Glaciologists Now: Ice in the Climate System"
The cryosphere plays a disproportionately important role in the climate
system and in global-change research. Ice cores provide the best
histories of climate change, and the most compelling evidence for
linkage of atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentration and temperature over
long times. Over shorter times, outburst floods and ice-sheet surges
triggered abrupt climate changes, flipping the North Atlantic "switch"
that controls whether water sinks before it freezes or freezes before it
sinks; sea ice provided the main feedbacks, with strong wintertime
changes. Cryospheric feedbacks are important in future climate change,
and sea-level rise from glacier and ice-sheet melting is probably the
clearest and most quantifiable cost of warming. Too much warming will
melt ice, and numerous recent events and studies suggest that sufficient
warming to melt one or more of the big ice sheets may be reached if
available fossil fuels are burned rapidly. Feedbacks on oceanic
circulation and other processes are possible, with poorly understood
impacts that could be large.
The convergence of cryospheric research is impressive. For example, the
joint efforts of ice geochemists and glacier-flow dynamicists together
develop and calibrate the ice-core records of abrupt climate changes
that were forced by ice dynamics and amplified by sea ice and snow
cover. Research priorities are clear, exciting, and compelling, with
much work yet to occur at the interfaces among cryospheric
subdisciplines.
General information about the Fall Meeting of AGU is available at:
http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm04/