NEW FRONTIERS OF KNOWLEDGE LAUREATE
The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award goes to Richard Alley, the “interpreter” of ice who uncovered the evidence of sudden climate changes
The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Climate Change category goes in this seventh edition to U.S. glaciologist Richard Alley for his “pioneering research” into the “mechanics of ice and its implications for abrupt climate change,” in the words of the jury’s citation.
9 January, 2015
Jury member Miquel Canals refers to Alley as “our best interpreter of ice. Although there are others working in different aspects of the field, he is the one who completed the circle: in ice he has read the history of the atmosphere, with its phases of abrupt change. He has elucidated its mechanisms of formation and deformation and how it interacts with climate. Alley explains the present while keeping a window open to the past and analyzing possible future paths.”
Ice is an archive of climate information. Alley, for instance, has studied ice cores that show the composition of our atmosphere over thousands of years, with sufficient precision to reconstruct past climate year by year in regions such as Greenland.
In doing so, he detected several instances in the last 12,000 years when average temperatures in large regions of the planet changed dramatically in under three years. This was the first evidence that climate variations could occur so abruptly.
Richard Alley (Ohio, 1957), a professor at The Pennsylvania State University (United States) declared himself “very happy” on being informed by phone of the award, adding that “the list of previous winners is a remarkable group.” With this recognition, he believes, “the BBVA Foundation is helping people see the benefit we get from environmental sciences, and how much they can contribute to our welleing.”
A career devoted to ice
Alley completed his PhD in geology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1987. He also took courses in physics, metallurgy and materials science. In his freshman year, in 1977, he got a summer job with a glaciologist who was studying the radioactive layer that atom bomb testing had left behind in the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. “And I’ve been working on ice ever since,” he remarked yesterday.
His first major insight came when still a PhD student. He had begun to study how snow turned into ice at the polar caps, analyzing the density of the snow, the size of its grains, its movement and other characteristics. In this way, at age thirty, he was able to establish a new paradigm in understanding how glaciers work, how they flow and how they respond to climate change.
He also “gained the ability to recognize annual layers in the ice cores we were studying,” he explained yesterday. “So when we went to Greenland and drilled the ice cores I was able to extract more information than had previously been possible, so we could develop a more detailed chronology of past climate change.”
It was in the course of this work, in 1993, that he made the discovery that North Atlantic temperatures had varied significantly over a short space of time during the Younger Dryas cold period, between 12,800 and 11,500 years ago. Some years later, he would identify a similar period of abrupt climatic change occurring just 8,200 years ago.
'We were very surprised that it was that fast,” he now recalls. “And this has a broader lesson for people. For when we think about climate change'
“We were very surprised that it was that fast,” he now recalls. “And this has a broader lesson for people. For when we think about climate change, we usually draw a smooth curve, as if it is something we can see coming and prepare for. But that is being very optimistic. I think it is wiser to heed the saying ‘hope for the best and plan for the worst.’ Assuming that we will get the best might not always be the wisest path forward.”
The main message he would like to convey to society is: “We would be much better off if we planned ahead using the science we have on climate change.”
Alley continues his research into the behavior of ice. He has taken part in over a dozen campaigns in Greenland and Antarctica, and on glaciers the world over. One area he returns to assiduously is West Antarctica, where, according to the accumulated evidence, the effects of climate change on glacier stability are most likely to be felt – an event which, if it occurs, would have consequences on a global scale.
He has also become one of our leading climate communicators. As the citation states: “Dr Alley’s work and his passionate ability to communicate climate system science have alerted our society to the risks, in a warming world, of rapidly disintegrating ice sheets and abrupt regional climate changes.”
Climate Change jury
The jury in this category was chaired by Bjorn Stevens, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (Germany). The secretary was Sandrine Bony, senior scientist at the Laboratoire de Météorologie Dynamique (LMD), run jointly by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and University Pierre et Marie Curie (France). Remaining members were Miquel Canals, Chairman of the Department of Stratigraphy, Paleontology and Geosciences at the University of Barcelona; Carlos Duarte, Director of the UWA Oceans Institute at the University of Western Australia; Martin Heimann, Director of the Department of Biogeochemical Systems at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry (Germany), and Edward S. Rubin, Professor of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University (United States).
