Symposium: Welcome to the Anthropocene? Metrics of a climate changed

An afternoon symposium on the anthropocene and how we define it.

Registration for this event: http://goo.gl/forms/al9tMpV0V1yGxoOA3

Programme

14:00-14:05: Opening remarks

14:10-14:40: Phil Gibbard (U. Cambridge) The Anthropocene; a formal stratigraphical unit, an informal concept, or an interval of Holocene time?

14:40-15:10: Dominic Hodgson (British Antarctic Survey, Durham U.) Southern Ocean westerly winds and the global CO2 sink

15:10-15:40: Tea break

15:40-16:10: Andrew Tanentzap (U. Cambridge) What does a greener boreal mean for the world’s freshwater ecosystems?

16:10-16:40: Dorothee Bakker (U. East Anglia) Ocean carbon observations for quantifying the ocean carbon sink and ocean acidification

16:40-17:10: Matt Rigby (U. Bristol) An atmospheric perspective on the world’s most effective, but inadvertent, climate policy

17:10-18:00: Reception

Speaker biographies

Phil Gibbard is Professor of Quaternary Palaeoenvironments in the University of Cambridge, England, and Dosent in the University of Helsinki, Finland.  He took his BSc degree in Geology at the University of Sheffield in 1971 and his PhD in the Subdepartment of Quaternary Research, Botany School, University of Cambridge in 1975. He is past-chair of the International Commission on Stratigraphy's Quaternary Subcommission and is currently Honorary Secretary elect of the International Commission on Stratigraphy. He has served as President, Secretary and member of the INQUA Stratigraphy and Geochronology Commission, and is a member of the INQUA Subcommission of European Quaternary Stratigraphy and the Geological Society of London's Stratigraphy Commission.  His research is focused on Quaternary and late Tertiary terrestrial and shallow marine sedimentation, stratigraphy and palaeoenvironmental evolution throughout Europe, but he has also worked in the Arctic, North America, India and South-East Asia.

Dominic Hodgson leads the Palaeoenvironments, Ice Sheets and Climate Change team at the British Antarctic Survey and is Visiting Professor of Geography at Durham University. He did his undergraduate degree at University College London, and his PhD at the University of Tasmania, Australia. He publishes research on high latitude climate and environmental change, glacial history, biogeography and subglacial environments. He has worked in the Antarctic Peninsula, East and West Antarctic Ice Sheets and a range of maritime and sub-Antarctic Islands.

Andrew Tanentzap is a University Lecturer in the Department of Plant Sciences at the University of Cambridge.  After completing his PhD at Cambridge, he held a postdoctoral research position with Landcare Research in New Zealand and an Independent Research Fellowship in Canada, prior to taking up his lectureship in 2013.

Dorothee Bakker is a Research Officer in Marine Biogeochemistry, based in the Centre for Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences of the School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich. Dorothee Bakker has an MSc in Soil Science from Wageningen Agricultural University (The Netherlands) (1991) and a PhD from the University of Groningen (1998). She has studied the marine carbon cycle from European shelf seas to the Southern Ocean in multidisciplinary, seagoing research projects. Her ongoing research addresses ocean acidification and the role of sea ice in the air-sea exchange of CO2 (carbon dioxide), as well as long-term variation in the ocean carbon sink.  Dorothee Bakker chairs the Surface Ocean CO2 Atlas (www.socat.info) since 2007.  She is an investigator on research projects funded by the Natural Environment Research Council and the European Union. Dorothee Bakker is an author of 63 peer-reviewed, scientific articles and supervises 7 PhD students.

Matt Rigby is a NERC Advanced Research Fellow in the Atmospheric Chemistry Research Group at the University of Bristol, and a Research Associate at the Center for Global Change Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was previously a Research Scientist. Before working at MIT, he studied for a PhD in Atmospheric Physics at Imperial College London. He holds a degree in Physics from the University of Cambridge, where he studied at Clare College.