The Two-Mile Time Machine : : Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future - Updated Edition / / Richard B. Alley.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton University Press Complete eBook-Package 2014-2015
• VerfasserIn: Alley, Richard B.,
• TeilnehmendeR: Alley, Richard B.
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2014]; ©2015
• Year of Publication: 2014
• Edition: Updated edition with a New Preface
• Language: English
• Series: Princeton Science Library ; 101
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (248 p.)

In the 1990s Richard B. Alley and his colleagues made headlines with the discovery that the last ice age came to an abrupt end over a period of only three years. In The Two-Mile Time Machine, Alley tells the fascinating history of global climate changes as revealed by reading the annual rings of ice from cores drilled in Greenland. He explains that humans have experienced an unusually temperate climate compared to the wild fluctuations that characterized most of prehistory. He warns that our comfortable environment could come to an end in a matter of years and tells us what we need to know in order to understand and perhaps overcome climate changes in the future.In a new preface, the author weighs in on whether our understanding of global climate change has altered in the years since the book was first published, what the latest research tells us, and what he is working on next.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Illustration -- Preface to the New Paperback Edition -- PART I. SETTING THE STAGE -- 1. Fast Forward -- 2. Pointers to the Past -- PART II. READING THE RECORD -- 3. Going to Greenland -- 4. The Icy Archives-Ice Sheets and Glaciers -- 5. Ice Age through the Ice Age -- 6. How Cold of Old? -- 7. Dust in the Wind -- 8. Tiny Bubbles in the Ice -- PART III. CRAZY CLIMATES -- 9. The Saurian Sauna -- 10. The Solar System Swing -- 11. Dancing to the Orbital Band -- 12. What the Worms Turned -- PART IV. WHY THE WEIRDNESS? -- 13. How Climate Works -- 14. A Chaotic Conveyor? -- 15. Shoving the System -- PART V. COMING CRAZINESS? -- 16. Fuelish -- 17. Down the Road -- 18. An Ice-Core View of the Future -- APPENDIXES -- Appendix 1. A Cast of Characters -- Appendix 2. Usage of Units -- Sources and Related Information -- Acknowledgments -- Index