Antarctic Climate Evolution

Antarctic Climate Evolution, Second Edition enhances understanding of the history of the world's largest ice sheet and, in particular, how it responded to and influenced climate change during the Cenozoic. To explain the story of Antarctic ice and climate history, information on terrestrial and marine geology, sedimentology, glacier geophysics, ship-borne geophysics, and numerical ice sheet and climate modelling is presented. The book's content largely mirrors the structure of the Antarctic Climate Evolution (ACE) program (www.scar-ace.org), an international initiative of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research (SCAR), affiliated with the International Polar Year 2007-2009, to investigate past changes in Antarctica by linking climate and ice sheet modelling studies with terrestrial and marine geological and geophysical evidence of past changes. In 2013 the new SCAR program PAIS Past Antarctic Ice Sheet dynamics followed ACE. PAIS obtained important achievements building on the ACE legacy, in constraining Antarctica's contribution to sea level, resulting from past changes in ice sheet mass loss and its impacts on environment, atmospheric and oceanic circulation. This new edition reflects these advances and is updated with several new chapters, including those covering marine and terrestrial life changes, ice shelves, advances in numerical modeling, and increases coverage of rates of change.

The cross-disciplinary approach of the ACE program and, subsequently, Antarctic Climate Evolution, Second Edition has led to substantial improvement in the knowledge base on past Antarctic climate and to our understanding of the factors that have guided its evolution. This in turn allows us to build hypotheses, examinable through numerical modelling, for how the Antarctic climate is likely to respond to present and future global changes. With its coverage of the complete history of the Antarctic Ice Sheet and its climate evolution, the book is of interest to research scientists from a wide range of disciplines including glaciology, palaeoclimatology, sedimentology, climate change, environmental science, oceanography and palaeoentology.

• Offers an overview of Antarctic climate change, analyzing historical, present-day and future developments
• Provides the latest information on subjects ranging from terrestrial and marine geology to sedimentology and glacier geophysics in the context of Antarctic evolution
• Fully updated to include expanded coverage of rates of change, advances in numerical modeling, marine and terrestrial life changes, ice shelves, and more