Professor of Geology Eugene Domack is the editor of Antarctic Peninsula Climate Variability: Historical and Paleoenvironemental Perspectives, published by the American Geophysical Union.
AGU released this "cohesive, structured monograph" at its annual meeting in December. According to AGU: "Geologists, oceanographers, glaciologists, meteorologists, ecologists, and natural historians will find this work an important integrative resource in their effort to understand how regional climates change."
In his introduction Domack wrote: The Antarctic Peninsula region represents our best natural laboratory to investigate how earth's major climate systems interact and how such systems respond to rapid regional warming. The scale of environmental changes now taking place across the region is large and their pace rapid but the subsystems involved are still small enough to observe and accurately document cause and affect mechanisms. For example, clarification of ice shelf stability via the Larsen Ice Shelf is vital to understanding the entire Antarctic Ice Sheet, its climate evolution, and its response to and control of sea level. By encompassing the broadest range of interdisciplinary studies, this volume provides the global change research and educational communities a framework in which to advance our knowledge of the causes behind regional warming, the dramatic glacial and ecological responses, and the potential uniqueness of the event within the region's paleoclimate record. The volume also serves as a vital resource for public policy and governmental funding agencies as well as a means to educate the large number of eco-tourists that visit the region each austral summer.
Antarctic Peninsula Climate Variability has many papers that were the result of work presented at an international workshop held at Hamilton College in April 2002. The book contains a paper co-authored by Jim Ring, Winslow Professor of Physics and Hamilton alumni, Stephanie Root '01, David Carlson '01 and William Wright '00. The other editors for the publication are Amy Leventer, Adam Burnett, Matthew Kirby '93, Robert Bindschadler and Peter Convey.
