Alley Receives Book Award

December 11, 2001

University Park, Pa. -- "The Two Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our Future," by Richard B. Alley, the Evan Pugh professor of geosciences at Penn State, is the 2001 recipient of the Phi Beta Kappa Book Award in Science.

The award is offered for outstanding contributions by scientists to the literature of science. It was first offered in 1959. The intent of the award is to encourage literate and scholarly interpretations of the physical and biological sciences and mathematics. Books that are exclusively histories of science are not eligible nor are biographies of scientists in which a narrative emphasis predominates.

"The Two Mile Time Machine," published by Princeton University Press in 2000, looks at GISP II (Greenland Ice Sheet Project II) and the information on climate change garnered from examination of ice cores retrieved from layers of ice left over the past 100,000 years. Included in the new knowledge is that of abrupt climate change, discovered by ice core findings that showed the last ice age came to an abrupt end over a period of only three years.

The 2000 award went to "Cradle of Life: The Discovery of the Earth's Earliest Fossils," by J. William Schopf also from Princeton University Press. In 1998, Pat Shipman, adjunct professor of anthropology at Penn State, won for "Taking Wing: Archaeopteryx & the Evolution of Bird Flight," Simon and Schuster.

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Contacts:

A'ndrea Elyse Messer (814) 865-9481 aem1@psu.edu

Vicki Fong (814) 865-9481 vfong@psu.edu