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Nexus
Expo presentation: CHANGES IN THE
ARCTIC ICE COVER- Koni Steffen, Ph.D.
Konrad Steffen, director of the Cooperative Institute for
Research in Environmental Studies at the University of Colorado,
Boulder, will discuss “Changes in the Arctic Ice Cover
– Greenland Ice Sheet and Surrounding Oceans”.
In 1990, he set up a research station, known
as Swiss Camp, on a platform drilled into Greenland’s
ice sheet. His observations there, confirmed with satellite
imagery, show an expanding melt area, including unprecedented
melt in recent years, especially 2002 and 2005. NASA images
show melting to a record elevation of 6,500 feet as well as
melting in areas where it had not occurred since satellites
began mapping the ice sheet in 1978.
Steffen’s findings have appeared in scientific
journals as well as BBC-TV reports and a 2005 New Yorker magazine
series on global climate change. His work, together with that
of his students and associates, has heightened knowledge of
arctic climate, warming and melting dynamics.
Bio: Learn
about Global Warming by one of the world's top researchers.
Who is Konrad Steffen? In future annals of arctic
science, Steffen may become one of the legends. A climatologist
known as "Koni" by all at CIRES
(Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences),
Steffen has spent an average of seven weeks in the high Arctic
every summer for the past 27 years-and is himself responsible
for a large part of the instrumentation that lets the world
know, hour by hour, conditions on the Greenland Ice Sheet
and how they're changing.
Steffen's career spans the dawn of
satellite remote sensing, unthought of advances in scientific
technology, and a period of profound change not only for the
Greenland Ice Sheet but for global climate change. Without
his work, together with that of his students and associates,
our knowledge of arctic climate, warming, and melting dynamics
would be much impoverished.
Steffen has studied conditions in the
Canadian Arctic, Switzerland, and China. But Greenland's ice
sheet-"the weather machine of Europe" as Steffen
calls it-has drawn him since 1990.
For more information, see the Greenland
Photo Journal, a photographic essay describing
one of Koni's annual month-long expeditions.
This information provided by the CIRES
website.
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