Book description
The global climate changes that led to the expansion and contraction of
high latitude ice sheets during the Quaternary period were associated
with equally dramatic changes in tropical environments. These included
shifts in vegetation zones, changes in the hydrology and ecology of
lakes and rivers, and fluctuations in the size of mountain glaciers and
sandy deserts. Until recently it was thought that such changes were
triggered by fluctuations in the distribution of polar ice cover. Now
there is increasing recognition that the tropics themselves have acted
as drivers of global climate change over a range of timescales.
The aim of Quaternary Environmental Change in the Tropics is
to provide a synthesis of the changes that occurred in tropical
terrestrial and marine systems during the Pleistocene and Holocene,
complementing data-derived reconstructions with output from
state-of-the-art climate models. It is targeted at final-year
undergraduate students and research specialists, but will provide an
introduction to tropical Quaternary research for a variety of other
readers.
Sarah Metcalfe is Professor of Earth and
Environmental Dynamics at the University of Nottingham, UK. She has
published extensively on environmental change in Latin America, with a
particular focus on Mexico. Although primarily a palaeolimnologist,
her approach is very much multi-proxy, including the use of historical
and instrumental records to help to improve our understanding of
recent change.
David Nash is Professor of Physical Geography at the University
of Brighton, UK. He is widely known for his publications on the
reconstruction of historical climate changes in southern Africa, as
well as his broader research into the contemporary and Quaternary
geomorphology of dryland regions including the Kalahari, Atacama and
southern Europe. His research uses methods ranging from scanning
electron microscopy and thin-section analysis to the interpretation of
historical documents.
