Arctic Icebreaker Reception and Nye Lecture
At the AGU Fall Meeting
Marriott Hotel, Salons 5 & 6
San Francisco, California
Tuesday, 9 December 2003 at 6:00 PM
For more information you may contact any of the following people from
the sponsoring organizations:
Mark Williams, markw [at] snobear.colorado.edu, CSFG
Wendy Warnick, warnick [at] arcus.org, ARCUS
Matthew Sturm, msturm [at] crrel.usace.army.mil, AINA
Larry Hinzman, ffldh [at] uaf.edu, USPA
General information about the Fall Meeting of AGU is available at:
http://agu.org/meetings/fm03/
A WARM WELCOME TO A COLD RECEPTION
Come see old friends and meet some new ones!
You are invited to 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), and the US Permafrost Association (USPA) at the Fall Meeting of
AGU in San Francisco. Join your colleagues for warm company, hot food,
and cold drinks.
Arctic Icebreaker Reception and Nye Lecture
Tuesday, 9 December 2003
6:00 PM - 6:30 PM - Reception
6:30 PM - 7:30 PM - Nye Lecture
7:30 PM - 9:00 PM - Reception Continues
Salons 5 & 6
Marriott Hotel
55 Fourth Street
San Francisco, California
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. Last year for the
first time the U.S. Permafrost Association joined as a sponsor and this
year is also hosted by the AGU Cryosphere Scientific Focus Group. The
reception features the second annual Nye Lecture, to be presented by
Kurt Cuffey who is from the University of California at Berkeley and a
winner of the AGU MacElwane Award.
General information about the Fall Meeting of AGU is available at:
http://agu.org/meetings/fm03/
Stable Isotopes in Ice: Tracers of the Global Environment
Kurt Cuffey, University of California at Berkeley
Significant advances in geophysical sciences most often follow from
development of new abilities to measure Earth's properties. One major
development of the past half century has been the measurement of stable
isotopic composition of precipitation and its variations on vast spatial
and temporal scales, the latter especially in Arctic and Antarctic
glacial ice. The venerable tradition of research in this subject
emanates directly from work of Dansgaard, Craig, and Epstein. Here I
discuss how isotopic variations induced by atmospheric distillation
offer a compelling example of a geophysical phenomenon arising from
microphysical properties, but one that is dependent on the global-scale
environment. I discuss how the geography of precipitation isotopes is
explicable by treating the problem as an advective diffusive reaction
system. Three of the most important results of environmental geophysics
have emerged from analyses exploiting (in part) the record of this
system in polar ice: the strong but quixotic coupling of climate and
biogeochemistry on multi-millennial time scales; the high but plausible
(and contentious) values for global climate sensitivity to radiative
forcings; and the documentation of past very rapid climate changes.
Looking forward, I also discuss the major unresolved issues lurking
behind this facade of success, including poor understanding of the
controls on deuterium excess at low temperatures, and inability to
quantify many non-temperature effects on isotope time series (many of
which were clearly discussed by Dansgaard nearly forty years ago).