Index | Next Record | Browse
|
|
Index | Next Record | Browse |
|
|
| ||
|
||
| For Pricing and Availability Click Here | ||
|
||
|
||
|
|
|
|
Table of contents:
The Great Ice Age is also our age. Not only is it a period when the Earth experienced rapid and regular climatic changes, it is also the time when a life form evolved that is capable of studying and manipulating environmental systems. Part 1 of The Great Ice Age documents and explains the natural climatic changes that have occurred during the past 2.6 million years. Exploring a wide range of records of climate change, the authors demonstrate the interconnectivity of the components of the Earth's climate system and show how the evidence for past climatic change is obtained from oceanic and terrestrial realms. Such changes occurred over a range of time scales from millions of years, through tens of thousands of years, to mere centuries and decades. A number of explanations for past climatic shifts are explored, revealing that, as yet, no all embracing model has emerged that can adequately explain all the evidence reviewed in the book. In Part 2, some of the biological effects of the climatic upheavals described in Part 1 are examined, focusing on palaeoecological changes involving plants and animals, the evolution of human anatomy, and the way in which conscious social behaviour developed as a response to rapidly changing selection pressures. Global climate change increasingly drove human beings towards mastery of their surroundings: the resultant anthropogenically induced environmental change extends back a million years or more, but has increased dramatically during the last ten thousand years since the last retreat of huge ice sheets. The record of past environmental changes discussed in The Great Ice Age is the foundation on which to base our understanding of the global experiment we are conducting as the 'conscious forcing function' in the evolution of the Earth system.
Contents:
Preface
Cycles of Climactic Change: Evidence and Explanations
1.The Great Ice Age
Introduction
Climactic detective work
A global perspective
Colder and drier, warmer and wetter
Summary
Further reading
2
Understanding Present and Past Climates
Introduction
Moving heat around
Forcing fictions and feedbacks
The evidence
Proxy data
The importance of time
The problem of resolution
Tine series
Understanding climate change
Summary
Further reading
3.Understanding the Cryosphere
Introduction
How ice sheets work
Accumulation and ablation
Glaciation and climate
How glaciers move
Limits to ice sheet expansion
How do ice sheets get strated? The Milankovich theory of ice ages
Summary
Further reading
4.The Deep Sea Record
Introduction
Deep sea sediments
Oxygen isotope studies
Global changes of sea-level
Oxygen isotope stages
Post-Cretaceous cooling
Summary
Futher reading
5
Revealing the Milankovich Pacemaker
Introduction
The deep-sea oxygen isotope record
Revealing the pacemaker
Oxygen isotope time stratigraphy
The future? Cave depositis
Introduction
The Devil's Hole record
A world without Milankovich? Dust, monsoons and Milankovich
Introduction
Chinese loss deposits
Monsoons and Milankovich
The record in ice sheets
Introduction
Isotopes and ice
The Vostock record
Dust: The key to calibrating the age of the Vostock ice cores
Summary
Further reading
6.Evidence for Rapid Climate Change
INtroduction
North Atlantic iceburg armadas
Rapid eustratic sea-level changes
Greenland ice cores
Introduction
Numerous interstadials
Methane
The present and penultimate interglacials compared
Dust records and the annual to millennial scale
Millennial scale events in the NE Pacific
Summary
Further reading
7.Explanations
Introduction
Post-Cretaceous cooling
Introduction
Magmatic processes
Continental drift and oceanic gateways
Tectonic uplift
Over the threshold
The Mid-Pleistocene revolution
Introduction
Ice sheet models
The change from 40 ka to 100 ka cyclicity
A multiple-state climate model
Millennial-scale climate and reorganisations of ocean circulation
Thermohaline seesaws
A role for the tropical Pacific? What next - when will the present interglacial end? Introduction
The length of past interglacials: a guide to the future? How might the present interglacial end? Will greenhouse gas buildup postpone the inevitable? Summary
Further reeading
Human Origins, Evolution and Environmental Change
8.Climate Change and Life on Land
Introduction
Plants and climate change
Spores and Pollen
Interpreting pollen diagrams
Spreading vegitation
Today's missong biome: glacial tundra
Insect as climate indicators
Climate change at lower latitudes
The diversity of tropical forests
Statis and co-evolving niches and species
Diversity from stress: the refugia view
Changes in Andean vegetation belts
Climate change in lowland South America
Tropical forest in Africa
Why not so divers
Brief Description:
Documents and explains the natural climatic and ecological changes that have occurred during the past 2.6 million years. It also outlines the emergence and global impact of humans during this period.
For Pricing and Availability Click Here
|
