William Richard Peltier, Ph.D., D.Sc. (hc) (born 1943), is university professor of physics at the University of Toronto. He is director of the Centre for Global Change Science , past principal investigator of the Polar Climate Stability Network , and the scientific director of Canada's largest supercomputer centre, SciNet . He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, of the American Geophysical Union, of the American Meteorological Society, and of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters..
His research interests include: atmospheric and oceanic waves and turbulence, geophysical fluid dynamics, physics of the planetary interior, and planetary climate.
He is notable for his seminal contributions to the understanding of the dynamics of the deep Earth, both concerning the nature of the mantle convection process and the circulation of the visco-elastic interior caused by the loading of the surface by continental scale ice sheet loads. His gravitationally self-consistent global theory of Ice-Earth-Ocean interactions has become widely employed internationally in the explanation of the changes of sea level that accompany both the growth and decay of grounded ice on the continents, both during the Late Quaternary era of Earth history and under modern global warming conditions. His models of the space-time variations of continental ice cover since the last maximum of glaciation are employed universally to provide the boundary conditions needed to enable modern coupled climate models to be employed to reconstruct past climate conditions. A most notable contribution to work of this kind has been his theory of the so-called Dansgaard-Oeschger millennial timescale oscillation of glacial climate. He has been the primary contributor to the global reconstructions ICE-3G, [1] ICE-4G, [2] ICE-5G (VM2), [3] and the most recent ICE-6G (VM5)model. These models are important for the quantification of post-glacial rebound and late Pleistocene to Holocene variations in sea level.
The Snowball Earth is a geohistorical hypothesis that proposes during one or more of Earth's icehouse climates, the planet's surface became nearly entirely frozen with no liquid oceanic or surface water exposed to the atmosphere. The most academically mentioned period of such a global ice age is believed to have occurred some time before 650 mya during the Cryogenian period, which included at least two large glacial periods, the Sturtian and Marinoan glaciations.
Geophysics is a subject of natural science concerned with the physical processes and physical properties of the Earth and its surrounding space environment, and the use of quantitative methods for their analysis. Geophysicists, who usually study geophysics, physics, or one of the Earth sciences at the graduate level, complete investigations across a wide range of scientific disciplines. The term geophysics classically refers to solid earth applications: Earth's shape; its gravitational, magnetic fields, and electromagnetic fields ; its internal structure and composition; its dynamics and their surface expression in plate tectonics, the generation of magmas, volcanism and rock formation. However, modern geophysics organizations and pure scientists use a broader definition that includes the water cycle including snow and ice; fluid dynamics of the oceans and the atmosphere; electricity and magnetism in the ionosphere and magnetosphere and solar-terrestrial physics; and analogous problems associated with the Moon and other planets.
Post-glacial rebound is the rise of land masses after the removal of the huge weight of ice sheets during the last glacial period, which had caused isostatic depression. Post-glacial rebound and isostatic depression are phases of glacial isostasy, the deformation of the Earth's crust in response to changes in ice mass distribution. The direct raising effects of post-glacial rebound are readily apparent in parts of Northern Eurasia, Northern America, Patagonia, and Antarctica. However, through the processes of ocean siphoning and continental levering, the effects of post-glacial rebound on sea level are felt globally far from the locations of current and former ice sheets.
Wallace "Wally" Smith Broecker was an American geochemist. He was the Newberry Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, a scientist at Columbia's Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory and a sustainability fellow at Arizona State University. He developed the idea of a global "conveyor belt" linking the circulation of the global ocean and made major contributions to the science of the carbon cycle and the use of chemical tracers and isotope dating in oceanography. Broecker popularized the term "global warming". He received the Crafoord Prize and the Vetlesen Prize.
Sir Nicholas John Shackleton was an English geologist and paleoclimatologist who specialised in the Quaternary Period. He was the son of the distinguished field geologist Robert Millner Shackleton and great-nephew of the explorer Ernest Shackleton.
Raymond Thomas Pierrehumbert is the Halley Professor of Physics at the University of Oxford. Previously, he was Louis Block Professor in Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago. He was a lead author on the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC and a co-author of the National Research Council report on abrupt climate change.
Gideon Mark Henderson FRS is a British geochemist whose research focuses on low-temperature geochemistry, the carbon cycle, the oceans, and on understanding the mechanisms driving climate change.
Peter Huybers is an American climate scientist, and Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University, in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences.
André Léon Georges Chevalier Berger is a Belgian climatologist and professor from Acoz. He is best known for his significant contribution to the renaissance and further development of the astronomical theory of paleoclimates and as a cited pioneer of the interdisciplinary study of climate dynamics and history.
Lawrence Mysak, is a Canadian applied mathematician, working primarily on physical oceanography, and climate research, particularly arctic and palaeoclimate research.
Anny Cazenave is a French space geodesist and one of the pioneers in satellite altimetry. She works for the French space agency CNES and has been deputy director of the Laboratoire d'Etudes en Geophysique et Oceanographie Spatiales (LEGOS) at Observatoire Midi-Pyrénées in Toulouse since 1996. Since 2013, she is director of Earth sciences at the International Space Science Institute (ISSI), in Bern (Switzerland).
Wolfgang "Wolf" Helmut Berger was a German-American oceanographer, geologist, micropaleontologist and emeritus professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of California, San Diego. His research interests comprise "micropaleontology, marine sedimentation, ocean productivity, carbon cycle, ocean history, climate history, and history of oceanography."
Aradhna Tripati is an American geoscientist, climate scientist, and advocate for diversity. She is a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where she is part of the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, the Department of Earth, Planetary, and Space Sciences, the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, and the California Nanosystems Institute. She is also the director of the Center for Diverse Leadership in Science. Her research includes advancing new chemical tracers for the study of environmental processes and studying the history of climate change and Earth systems. She is recognized for her research on climate change and clumped isotope geochemistry. She studies the evolution of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and the impacts on temperature, the water cycle, glaciers and ice sheets, and ocean acidity.
Axel Timmermann is a German climate physicist and oceanographer with an interest in climate dynamics, human migration, dynamical systems' analysis, ice-sheet modeling and sea level. He served a co-author of the IPCC Third Assessment Report and a lead author of IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. His research has been cited over 18,000 times and has an h-index of 70 and i10-index of 161. In 2017, he became a Distinguished Professor at Pusan National University and the founding Director of the Institute for Basic Science Center for Climate Physics. In December 2018, the Center began to utilize a 1.43-petaflop Cray XC50 supercomputer, named Aleph, for climate physics research.
Trevor John McDougall is an Australian physical oceanographer specialising in ocean mixing and the thermodynamics of seawater. He is Emeritus Scientia Professor of Ocean Physics in the School of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, and is Past President of the International Association for the Physical Sciences of the Oceans (IAPSO) of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics.
Colette L. Heald is a Canadian-born professor at ETH Zurich who is an expert in atmospheric chemistry.
Natalya Gomez is a professor, researcher, cryosphere and sea level expert whose research primarily centers around the interactions between ice sheets, sea level, and earth in the past, present and future. Gomez is a professor at McGill University, a Canada Research Chair in Geodynamics of Ice sheet - Sea level interactions, and received the AGU Cryosphere Early Career Award in 2019.
Jean Lynch-Stieglitz is a paleoceanographer known for her research on reconstructing changes in ocean circulation over the last 100,000 years.
John Matthew Wahr was an American geophysicist and geodesist, known for his research on Earth's rotation, Earth tides, ocean tides, post-glacial rebound, and other topics in the geosciences.