© Rachel HowlandProfessor emeritus Don Easterbrook is a specialist in glacial geology. “I’ve been on them, in them, under them and over them,” Easterbrook said.
Easterbrook has studied climate change from the ice ages to the present day. His focus is in studying the movements of glaciers from climate change, as well as doing isotopic analysis of the elements found in ice cores.
He believes the Earth is currently in a cooling period. He continues to research climate change with an international team of over 50 members, including solar physicists, atmospheric physicists and glacial geologists. He is the author of eight books and more than 150 journal publications, including
Evidence-Based Climate, which was published in September 2011.
How long have you been working or researching specifically climate change, and what is your background in the field?I've been working on climate change 50 years. The way I approached it is by first studying the fluctuations of glaciers, both modern ones and ancient ones, which allow you to reconstruct what the climate was like when the glaciers were advancing and retreating. They're like very old paleo-thermometers. They allow you to determine what the climate was doing.
When the climate is cold and snowy the glaciers advance, and when it is warm and dry they retreat. They leave a footprint of where they have been. So you follow those footprints, and you can tell what the glaciers have been doing, which tells you what the climate was doing. I also work with isotopes. They too carry a signature footprint of old climates.
