Richard B. Alley (Ohio, United States; 1957) obtained a PhD in geology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1987. He has since pursued his academic and research career at Pennsylvania State University, where he has held a professorship since 1998.
He has served on numerous national and international committees concerned with climate change. In particular, he was lead author of the chapter “Changes in Snow, Ice and Frozen Ground” for the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and a contributing author to the second and third IPCC reports.
In 2014, he chaired the research panel of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences which prepared the influential report “Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change. Anticipating Surprises.”
Author of over 240 publications with over 13,000 citations, he is regularly called on to advise governments and institutions. An able communicator, his outreach and awareness-raising efforts on climate change include the book The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future, and the TV series Earth: The Operators’ Manual (screened by the Public Broadcasting Service in 2012). He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and, since 2014, a foreign member of the Royal Society.
Speech
Climate Change, 7th edition
“I’m a geologist. My research has taken me round the planet from Greenland to Antarctica. I’m fascinated by how our climate has changed, dramatically and often, from times with ice everywhere to times with practically no ice anywhere.”
“I’m a geologist. My research has taken me round the planet from Greenland to Antarctica. I’m fascinated by how our climate has changed, dramatically and often, from times with ice everywhere to times with practically no ice anywhere.”
TUITEAR
These were the words chosen by
Richard Alley, professor at Pennsylvania State University (United States), to open the TV series ‘Earth: The Operators’ Manual’, which he hosted for U.S. broadcaster PBS. His message is unequivocal: “I know how much we all need energy, and also how our use of fossil fuels for energy is pushing us towards a climate unlike any seen in the history of civilization. But I believe science offers us answers to the challenges.”
Alley has been distinguished in the Climate Change category in the seventh edition of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards. One of his findings, which he has sought to relay to society through documentaries and outreach publications, is that global climate can change abruptly.
In 1993, he made the discovery that the last ice age, the Younger Dryas cold period occurring between 12,800 and 11,500 years ago, ended abruptly in just three short years, when temperatures in the North Atlantic rose by around ten degrees. Until then, scientists had no idea that the climate could change that quickly. The data, however, had an unimpeachable source, one of the most reliable archives of climate history: the Arctic ice sheet.
Alley is regarded as amongst the foremost ‘interpreters’ of ice, a skill acquired and cultivated during research campaigns in Greenland and the Antarctic, as well as glaciers the world over. The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award recognizes his “pioneering research,” into “the mechanics of ice and their implications for abrupt climate change,” in the words of the jury’s citation.
It was in the summer months that Richard B. Alley had his epiphany with ice. After his first year as a geology student at Ohio State University, he took a holiday job with a glaciologist studying the radioactive layer that atom bomb testing had left behind in the polar ice caps. One year later, in 1978, he took part in his first Antarctic campaign. “And I’ve been working on ice ever since.”
His first major insight, when still a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, would establish a new paradigm in understanding how glaciers work. In 1986, in the pages of Nature, he ventured the hypothesis that the West Antarctic ice sheet relies for its stability on the deformation of the underlying sediments. The confirmation of this idea influenced subsequent estimates of the impact of higher temperatures on the glaciers and sea level.
Trained in materials science as well as geology, Alley’s research interest extended to the properties of snow and how it turns into ice, its density, the size of its grains, its movement and other characteristics. This equipped him to spot previously undetected patterns in ice core samples. “I gained the ability to recognize annual layers in the ice cores we were studying. So when we went to Greenland and drilled the cores, I was able to extract more information than had previously been possible and plot a more detailed chronology of past climate change.”
The polar ice caps have been accumulating snow over hundreds of thousands of years. And the ice there conserves records of temperature, rainfall, the composition of atmospheric dust and, of course, levels of gases like methane and carbon dioxide trapped in the enclosed air bubbles. Drilling for ice samples – cylindrical cores around 10 centimeters thick – began in the mid-20th century, but it was not until the 1990s that it was able to reach depths of over three kilometers to extract ice dating back beyond 100,000 years. Alley was part of the team that drilled the GISP2 ice core over five summers between 1989 and 1993 from what was then the record-breaking depth of 3,053.44 meters.
As he relates: “We can actually count down through the years of history, starting in the present and working gradually backwards. So we went more than 10,000 years back without seeing very large or fast changes, and then we came across a sort of a cliff. In very few years, maybe ten maybe fewer, we saw very large changes across all the indicators.” What they had found was the abrupt warming that ended the Younger Dryas.
“The speed of the changes took us all by surprise,” notes Alley in The Two-Mile Time Machine, his popular account of these revelations from Earth’s climatic past. “We once believed that a little change in the brightness of the sun, or the position of the continents, or the composition of the air caused small changes in the climate. But the ice cores tell a more complicated story. Sometimes, a small push has knocked the climate system into a different mode of operation, bringing new weather patterns to much of the planet in only a few years.”
“This has a broader lesson for people,” he reflects. “For when we think about climate change, we usually view it as something we can see coming and prepare for. But that is being extremely optimistic.”
Richard Alley has contributed prominently to various reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and was one of the authors, in 2014, of the study “Abrupt Impacts of Climate Change.” In his free time, he pursues his secondary vocation as an educational singer-songwriter, with credits that include Rocking around the Silicates.
His message for society: “We would be much better off if we could just plan ahead using the science we have on climate change.”
