• Wally Broecker delivers his lecture

    Looking Back to Wally Broecker

    Carleton students and faculty members packed the Boliou lecture hall last Wednesday to hear geochemist Wally Broecker deliver a lecture entitled “How to Terminate a Glacial Period.” Dr. Broecker, the Newberry Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, described new research that gives insight into the Younger Dryas period, a time of cold climate conditions eleven to twelve thousand years ago. In the ongoing research of global warming, this era serves as a particularly interesting example of a time of rapid climate change, when the thermohaline conveyer of ocean currents suddenly shut down, possibly as a result of the flooding of ancient Lake Agassiz (present day Great Lakes) into the Atlantic Ocean. Dr. Broecker has written that the Younger Dryas “holds the key to understanding abrupt climate change” and thus, merits extensive research given our current situation with global warming.

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