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Time: 1:35pm -2:25pm

Richard Alley

Bio: Dr. Richard Alley (Ph.D. 1987, Geology, Wisconsin) is Evan Pugh University Professor of Geosciences at Penn State. He studies the great ice sheets to help predict future changes in climate and sea level, and has made four trips to Antarctica, nine to Greenland, and more to Alaska and elsewhere. He has been honored for research (including election to the US National Academy of Sciences and Foreign Membership in the Royal Society), teaching, and service. Dr. Alley participated in the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize), and has provided requested advice to numerous government officials in multiple administrations from both major political parties including a US Vice President, multiple Presidental Science Advisors, and committees and individual members of the US Senate and House of Representatives. He has authored or coauthored over 300 refereed scientific papers. He was presenter for the PBS TV miniseries on climate and energy Earth: The Operators’ Manual, and author of the book The Two-Mile Time Machine

Presenter information and contact

rba6@psu.edu

https://www.geosc.psu.edu/directory/richard-alley

Karen Alley

Bio: My research is part of the large glaciological community effort to understand how the world’s glaciers and ice sheets are contributing to sea-level rise in a warming climate. I am particularly interested in the ice-ocean interactions that hold a major control on the stability of the Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets and many smaller ice caps and glaciers. Much of my work has focused on the nature of melting beneath the floating ice shelves that fringe the Antarctic continent, which in turn modulates rates of ice delivery to the ocean. My current interests have expanded to include processes at other ice-stream boundaries: the calving processes that control rates of ice-tongue retreat and ice-shelf collapse, grounding-line processes that change ice flow velocities and the impacts of the ocean-induced melting, and shear-margin processes that control the stability of the grounded ice that feeds the ice-ocean interfaces. Most of my work is carried out through satellite remote sensing techniques and through the collection of field data.