Editor-in-Chief, Encyclopedia of Quaternary Science	January 2007
	I am interested in how global warming is adversely affecting the world’s animals and plants. There are already so many species that are on the edge of extinction because of loss of habitat from human interference, and if you push a little bit harder with adverse climate then they’ve got no place to go. In previous times of warming climates, before humans were really dominating the planet, animals and plants were free to migrate into new regions to find suitable climate, but now it’s tough to migrate across populated areas where there is either farmland or cities. There is no habitat for any natural species. I think the pace of extinction is going to simply increase as global warming continues and habitats continue to shrink.

I read that you grew up in the Rocky Mountain region of Colorado. Do you think growing up in such an amazing landscape influenced your interest in Earth sciences?

Probably, because geology is all around you in the Rockies. The bedrock geology is visible throughout the region, and as you are driving up a mountain road you can see all the different strata exposed. Some of them are tilted at strange angles, and there are also dinosaur beds nearby in Denver. Geology is right in front of you all the time.

Did you appreciate your environment and nature as a child? I grew up in Alaska, but as I kid I don’t think I really appreciated my environment because I didn’t know any different.

As a small kid I was more interested playing and that sort of thing, but in junior high and high school I was very interested in ecology, biology and natural history. I was collecting insects as a ten or eleven year old boy.

Did you know as early as high school what you wanted to study in college? I know that you went the University of Colorado, and you received your Bachelor of Arts and Ph.D. in environmental biology.

I decided what I wanted to study before I started college. Biology fascinated me in high school and I did well in it. So I started out as a biology major and never switched.

Following your Ph.D. you became a post-doctoral fellow under Professor Alan Morgan in the Earth Science department at the University of Waterloo, and then you spent six months as a visiting scientist in Switzerland at the Geobotanical Institute. How did those experiences affect your career?

It got me into research labs that were very productive places with lots of research, publications and grants going forward, so it was good on-the-job training for practical academic science.

How did you like living out of the country?

I enjoyed it. We have a daughter who was born in Canada, and that was interesting. She has dual citizenship. Switzerland was a fascinating place to live too, just being near the Alps and being able to see different landscapes and climb mountains and glaciers. It’s a beautiful country.

Have you done a lot of travel through your career?

Yes, quite a lot. I’ve done a lot of field work in remote places like Alaska.

Right. I read that.

I have never traveled to the Far East or the tropics, but my work has been mainly in colder regions. I’ve been able to go to most of the cold regions I’m interested in.

In 1982 you went back to Colorado to be a research associate and fellow at the Institute of Artic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado. You were there for twenty years?

Just about, yes.

What was your focus of study there?

I’ve always worked on Pleistoceneinsect fossils, but the geographic focus changed from time to time as opportunities came up. I started out there, and I went back there to work on insect fossils from the Rocky Mountains. Eventually I was able to expand my research into the desert southwest, and then later in Alaska. Once I got started in Alaska I got hooked, and have been working there ever since.

When you go out in the field to places like Alaska, how long are you out there?

Three weeks to a month, something like that. I usually try to plan trips where I have multiple stops on a circuit and then I bring back a lot of samples. I spend the next year analyzing the samples.

You left Colorado to move the UK to work in physical geography at the University of London. What made you decide to make that move?

I was telling someone the other day it was because of the weather, and they thought I was serious [laugher]. The gloomy winters and the rain. Well, my ambition as a young academic was always to be a college professor, and that opportunity just didn’t come up at the University of Colorado. They were happy for me to do research there, but I could never seem to crack the academic system of getting into a teaching job. This was the first bona fide opportunity I had to do what I really love doing, which is teaching.

So you are working in the geography department?

Yes. In the United States Quaternary science is mainly done in geology departments, but in the UK it has always been in geography departments, so that’s why I’m teaching in a geography department. It’s a peculiarity of the British system.

I don’t think a lot of people know what Quaternary science is. It refers to a geologic period which began more than two million years ago with the growth of northern hemisphere continental glaciers and the ice age, correct?

Yes, that’s right.

So Quaternary science is the study of that period, and linking the past to the present and the future?

Yes, and the reason this link is so effective is because the Quaternary is the most recent geologic era, so it has the most in common with the modern environment and potentially forecasting the future as well.

Yes, I read that this field of research has been growing in scientific and societal importance in recent years because it can help anticipate changes affecting the earth and the human race, things like natural disasters which have had a huge impact on everyone lately.

There are a lot of different areas. Natural disasters is one, climate change another, changes in ocean current patterns and sea level changes are all things that we can model based on what has happened in the past.

You said that your focus has always been on fossil insect analysis. Where do you find insect fossils? Are they preserved in rocks?

They are in peaty deposits.

How far back do insects go?

Insects have been around for hundreds of millions of years; however, I am only interested in the last couple million years. I’m looking at things that are still living today.

Do you find insect species that exist today and also existed two million years ago that are in the same form and haven’t evolved?

That is the amazing thing. Beetles are the main insect group that preserve well as fossils, and as far as we can tell beetles have not evolved over the entire Quaternary period. They are very, very stable, which is wonderful if you are trying to piece together an environmental picture. We can go to the modern specimens of these things and find out where they live, what they eat, what kind of climate they live in and we can apply all of those bits of information directly into the past because they are not extinct, they are still around. We don’t have to wonder what kind of environments they liked.

Have they adapted to climate change, or do they just move?

No, they just keep moving around. They are very mobile, and every generation of insects produces lots and lots of offspring and they fan out in all directions. The ones that go and get situated in a place that is suitable for them survive, and the ones that don’t will die out. They keep surviving by constant shifting into new regions.

Since Quaternary science goes to present day, does the Encyclopedia cover modern environmental problems, like how global warming is affecting the planet?

Yes. In fact, there is a really good article on that topic linking what we know about past climate change with what is predicted to happen in the coming decade in the Encyclopedia.

Does it also talk about the consequences of global warming if it continues to get worse?

Yes, it does. I think it will be a useful publication for a lot of different people.

Yes, definitely. Are bigger hurricanes a consequence of climate change?

Yes and no. It’s not a real straight-forward relationship. We have an article called Paleotempestology, which is the history of violent weather, such as hurricanes.

I bet a lot of people will find that article interesting.

The ironic thing is that the guy who was writing that article had to suspend writing it because he lives in Louisiana. He was at LSU and Hurricane Katrina knocked him out. When the climate is hotter, and the seas are warmer there is more thermal energy out there in the atmosphere and in the ocean, and it’s that thermal energy that drives the creation of hurricanes and typhoons. Consequently, the hotter the climate the more violent weather we should have.

Do you know what country is the largest source of global warming pollution?

I’m afraid it’s the one you are sitting in right now (US).

That’s what I thought, but I wondered if it might be Asia.

It’s predicted to change in coming years, because not only are the populations of places like India and China growing, but their level of industrialization is also booming. CO 2 production is predicted to become a greater problem in Asia than it is in America today.

I read that you have done quite a bit of study on the ice age, at national parks in the Rocky Mountains and at Alaska National Parks. How do you study the ice age?

It’s all based on fossils from the ice age. Insect fossils, plants, pollen, mammals and all kinds of fossils are out there.

What does the ice age tell you about the future? Do you think there will be another ice age?

I think it’s pretty much inevitable because it is all driven by changes in Earth’s orbit around the sun. That is a very slow process on the orders of tens of thousands of years. But we are due for another ice age about now.

Really?

The question is will we enter another ice age, because we are affecting our own climate so much by the greenhouse gas warming. There is some speculation that we are actually preventing the onset of the next ice age because of greenhouse gas boosting in the atmosphere.

When was the last ice age?

The last ice age ended about ten thousand years ago.

What would be the indications that an ice age is beginning? It obviously takes a long time to cover a continent with ice.

The onset of an ice age is a gradual thing. Ice would start to build up in the North Pole region and spread out onto Northern Canada and Northern Russia. It would take decades to centuries before it would really affect the mid-latitudes. It generally cools during the onset of an ice age, which is what causes it to happen.

Could it actually be a good thing that we may be preventing the next ice age?

Who knows? It’s hard to say. I am interested in how global warming is adversely affecting the world’s animals and plants. There are already so many species that are on the edge of extinction because of loss of habitat from human interference, and if you push a little bit harder with adverse climate then they’ve got no place to go. In previous times of warming climates, before humans were really dominating the planet, animals and plants were free to migrate into new regions to find suitable climate, but now it’s tough to migrate across populated areas where there is either farmland or cities. There is no habitat for any natural species. I think the pace of extinction is going to simply increase as global warming continues and habitats continue to shrink.

Do you cover all these issues in the Encyclopedia?

Yes, however, it’s not the real focus of the Encyclopedia. The focus is more historical. There are a few introductory articles where we talk about implications for society and the future.

What has been the biggest technological change that has improved the way you do research?

There have been so many. We have a lot more precise dating methods now than we did twenty years ago. You can date much smaller samples, get more precise ages of materials and we can date more kinds of materials now than we ever could before.

How do you predict technology will change in the next five years?

Now, there’s a tough one. I don’t know. I think our level of precision in minute sampling will continue to improve. A whole new dating method has come out in the last ten years; it’s called cosmogenic nuclide dating. What happens is you get high energy particles, like electrons flying through the universe from things like stars exploding, that strike planet Earth and form certain isotopes in minerals on the surface of rocks. The longer a rock is exposed to this cosmogenic radiation the greater the buildup of certain isotopes in the minerals on the surface. So you can now date rocks that are sitting on a surface and determine how long they’ve been sitting there, which is fantastic because we can date all sorts of different phenomena like the ages of glacial deposits and whether a rock has been sitting on a landscape for a thousand years or a hundred thousand years. It has revolutionized geomorphology and all kinds of glacial studies. We wouldn’t have even guessed that this would be possible ten years ago.

How long of a project was this Encyclopedia?

It started in earnest at a meeting three years ago.

I read that there are over 300 articles in the Encyclopedia. How many contributors did you have?

Over 400 people contributed, and there are about 320 articles.

How did you decide on what topics to cover?

My main task was to try to make sure that all the different aspects of Quaternary science were covered. No one person can be an expert in all these areas, so my most important job was to assemble the editorial board.

What were some of the important aspects?

Things like paleooclimates, glaciology, all the different biological indicators of past environments we call proxies, sea level studies, ice core studies, the human aspects of human evolution and archaeology and a few others. I talked to people who are leading experts in those fields and tried to find people who would agree to serve as section editors.

Was that difficult?

Yes, it took awhile. It was a big effort on my part. Once we had the editorial board more or less formed, Elsevier brought everyone to Oxford for a brainstorming session and we worked over the potential topics and talked about potential authors we might try to approach and built it up from there. In some sections I did a lot of recruiting of authors, and in other sections the section editor went away and found his or her own authors.

How big is the editorial board?

Seventeen associate editors and eight section editors.

Do you feel like you learned a lot during this process?

Oh yes, an awful lot. Nobody is an expert in all of these different topics. If I could just remember everything I’ve read I’d be a Quaternary science genius! It’s really been a fascinating experience. Of course, there were frustrating times, and technical glitches and people who don’t cooperate and so forth. But the staff at Elsevier has been extremely helpful to me.

What are some of the developments in Quaternary science that are highlighted in this four-volume set?

We have a section on paleoceanography, the study of the ancient reconstruction of the seas. That has always been an important topic in Quaternary science. In the last twenty years it has really taken off with the study of all sorts of micro fossils, as well as different chemical tracers in the oceans that tell us about climate change . The current research in that field has to do with how energy, especially heat energy, is transferred from one part of the world to another through ocean currents. We are just coming to grips with that. We know it’s linked with glaciation, but we are struggling with how energy is transferred from one hemisphere to another. It appears that the oceans play a pivotal role in this process.

You show evidence of that in the Encyclopedia?

Yes, and how the connections might work. It’s difficult because it takes modeling and lots of data to try to piece it all together.

And other developments that you cover?

The paleobotony section has studies of plant macrofossils, pollen and diatoms. In these studies, there are more numerical techniques that are coming out. The techniques are becoming more refined, in order to tease apart the different aspects of environmental change that affect vegetation. And then the ice core section is very dynamic. They are doing drilling now of really deep cores, kilometers long cores, of ice from both Antarctica and Greenland. We are now working back into the several hundred thousand year range of ice core data. That is one of the leading aspects of Quaternary science, as well.

Did you have a contributor that was actually present at the drilling of the ice cores?

Yes. We have an excellent article by a Danish guy who was one of the leading technical experts on how to drill effective ice cores. The coring is so difficult when you are working at something like 40 below zero, the core drills tend to literally freeze up. It’s a very difficult technical job, and we have excellent information on that in the Encyclopedia. In paleoanthropology, the human record, we are tracking the moments of the modern human species out of Africa and into the other parts of the world. We are getting a better sense of when those migrations happened and what might have been some of the driving forces behind it. For example, climate change might have been one of the main driving forces. That is an exciting section.

Who is the intended audience for this work?

Starting at the undergraduate level and working up from there.

What would you like librarians to know about this Encyclopedia?

I think it’s fair to say that never before has all of Quaternary science been encapsulated in one publication. If Quaternary science is being taught at a university, and if they want to have one source where students could go for information, this would be it.

Has there ever been an encyclopedia of Quaternary science?

No, this is the only one. The other tremendous strength, and one of the reasons I got excited about the whole project, is that it will be online. As long as the university has the rights for the ScienceDirect search engine, students will be able to dig data and information out of all these different articles online.

Will you be updating it online?

Yes. We plan to bring in new articles or update the content of articles that have been superseded by new technology or information.

Where do you see yourself in five or ten years?

My own research continues to be in Beringia, which is Alaska, the Yukon Territory, the Bering Land Bridge and unglaciated parts of Siberia.

Have you been to Siberia?

No, but I have a Russian post doc working for me who has done all of her work there. We have a new grant proposal in that would send her back to parts of northeastern Siberia to collect more samples. We are interested in interglacial deposits. There was an interval about four hundred thousand years ago that was a really long warm interval, and that might be the best comparative time to what might happen in the future of global warming with the really extended warm period. Hopefully we’ll get the chance to write that up and make a contribution that way.

Click here to email this article to a friend
Click here for more information on the Encyclopedia of Quaternary Science

This article by Jacqui Tavis
j.tavis@elsevier.com