Frozen earth: The once and future story of ice ages

Frozen Earth: The Once and Future Story of Ice Ages

Volumn , Issue , 2013, Pages

  Macdougall, Doug ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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EID: 84887806316     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: None     Document Type: Book

References (22)

1. John C. Crowell, Pre-Mesozoic Ice Ages: Their Bearing on Understanding the Climate System (Boulder, CO: Geological Society of America, 1999). This is Memoir 192 of the Geological Society of America. Crowell has spent a distinguished career studying ice ages and here uses his immense expertise to sift through and summarize the disparate evidence for each of the Earth's ancient ice ages and to search for their causes and connections to the climate system.
2. M. J. Hambrey, Glacial Environments (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1994). A well-illustrated treatment of the effects of glaciers on landscape.
3. J. Imbrie and K. P. Imbrie, Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery (Short Hills, NJ: Enslow, 1979). A well-written account of how ideas about ice ages developed, with insights (by one of the participants) into the work on sediment cores that confirmed the astronomical controls on Pleistocene glaciation.
4. R. A. Muller and Gordon J. Macdonald, Ice Ages and Astronomical Causes (New York: Springer, 2000). A technical and mathematical analysis of the evidence for astronomical control of ice ages.
5. Louis Agassiz, Studies on Glaciers, Preceded by the Discourse of Neuchâtel, ed. and trans. by Albert V. Carozzi (New York: Hafner, 1967). This is an English translation of Agassiz's famous Études sur les glaciers, originally published in 1840. It also includes the text of Agassiz's address to the Natural History Society of Switzerland in Neuchâtel in 1837. The translation includes the magnificent drawings that accompanied the original book.
6. Edward Lurie, Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). A comprehensive scholarly account of Louis Agassiz's life. However, it focuses mainly on his contributions to biology, with very little discussion devoted to the theory of ice ages.
7. Jules Marcou, Life,Letters, and Works of Louis Agassiz (New York: Macmillan, 1896). A very detailed account of Agassiz's life written by a colleague and personal friend who is perhaps a little biased in his treatment. Although the book is written in English, Marcou reproduced many of Agassiz's letters in their original French.
8. James Croll, Climate and Time in Their Geological Relations: A Theory of Secular Changes of the Earth's Climate (London: Daldy, Isbister, 1875). Croll's masterpiece, in which he brings together his ideas about the Earth's climate.
9. J.C. Irons, Autobiographical Sketch of James Croll, with Memoir of his Life and Work (London: Edward Stanford, 1896). A sympathetic account written by a friend who wished to make the remarkable details of Croll's life known to a wider audience. It includes a listing of all of Croll's publications. It is still the only biography available.
10. Milutin Milankovitch, Cannon of Insolation and the Ice-Age Problem (Jerusalem: Israel Program for Scientific Translations, 1969). Originally published in 1941 in Belgrade as Kanon der Erbestrahlund and seine Anwendung auf das Eiseitenproblem, this was Milankovitch's culminating effort to bring together all of his calculations and ideas about the Earth's climate. Much more mathematically based than James Croll's Climate and Time, it is, like that earlier book, a masterpiece.
11. Milutin Milankovitch, Milutin Milankovitch 1879-1958 (European Geophysical Society, 1995). This slim volume documenting Milankovitch's life was put together by his son, Vasko, after his father's death. It draws heavily on Milankovitch's autobiography and is well-illustrated with photographs.
12. V. R. Baker, ed. Catastrophic Flooding: The Origin of the Channeled Scabland. Benchmark papers in Geology, 55 (Stroudsburg, PA: Dowden, Hutchinson & Ross, 1981). This compilation includes the important scientific papers (mostly authored by J. Harlan Bretz) that led to the acceptance of a catastrophic flood origin for the Channeled Scablands, each preceded by a commentary written by the editor.
13. Paul F. Hoffman and Daniel P. Schrag, "Snowball Earth" (Scientific American, January 2000). Hoffman has been the leading proponent of the Snowball Earth hypothesis, and here he and his Harvard colleague Daniel Schrag present their arguments in clear and convincing language.
14. Gabrielle Walker, Snowball Earth: The Story of the Great Global Catastrophe That Spawned Life As We Know It (New York: Crown Publishers, 2003). Walker accompanied Hoffman to some of the important geological localities that provide evidence for the Snowball Earth hypothesis. In this book she gives a lively and very readable account that focuses (positively) on Hofmann's ideas but also touches on those of some of his opponents.
15. William H. Calvin, The Ascent of Mind: Ice Age Climates and the Evolution of Intelligence (New York: Bantam Books, 1991). Calvin argues that the evolution of human intelligence was stimulated by the ice age climate of Africa. He focuses especially on the implications of fluctuating climate (and the consequent effects on vegetation) for human behavior and brain size.
16. William H. Calvin, A Brain for All Seasons: Human Evolution and Abrupt Climate Change (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Calvin updates the arguments of his previous book (above) with new evidence from ice cores for extremely rapid climate fluctuations.
17. Steven M. Stanley, Children of the Ice Age: How a Global Catastrophe Allowed Humans to Evolve (New York: Harmony Books, 1996). Stanley argues that the ice age climate in Africa was a key element in the evolution of humans.
18. Brian Fagan, The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850 (New York: Basic Books, 2000). A delightful and fact-packed book that details the chronology of events during the period of the Little Ice Age.
19. P. D. Jones, A. E. J. Ogilvie, T. D. Davies, and K. R. Briffa, eds., History and Climate (New York: Kluwer Academic/Plenum Publishers, 2001). A series of academic papers on many aspects of climate and history, from effects on agriculture to the spread of disease. The contributions are based on papers given at the Second International Climate and History Conference, which took place at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom in September 1998.
20. H. H. Lamb, Climate, History and the Modern World (1982; 2d ed., New York: Routledge, 1995). A classic study of the effects of climate on world history.
21. Richard B. Alley, The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). Alley has spent much of his career working on ice cores and in this book provides an enthusiastic insider's view of the harsh working conditions at the Greenland Ice Cap and the excitement and scientific rewards that accrue from unraveling the story contained there. He also reflects on the implications of these records for our future.
22. Committee on Abrupt Climate Change, National Research Council, Abrupt Climate Change: Inevitable Surprises (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 2002). This book, compiled by a committee of the National Research Council (U.S.A.), presents the evidence for abrupt climate change that was available at the time of its publication and makes recommendations about further research necessary to help deal with such changes should they occur in the future.