‘Climate Change’: New title in the Key Ideas in Geography series

Professor Mike Hulme's new book 'Climate Change' publishes today, the latest title in the Routledge student textbook series Key Ideas in Geography, edited by Noel Castree and Audrey Kobayashi.

Hulme makes the case that the power of climate change as an idea can only be grasped from a vantage point that embraces the social sciences, humanities and natural sciences. The book is a synthesis of Hulme's 40-year research on the science, discourses and cultural politics of climate change. In ten carefully crafted chapters, he presents climate change as an idea with a past, a present and a future, and illustrates the many ways different political, social and cultural movements in today's world seek to make sense of climate change, and how they act accordingly.

Piers Vitebsky awarded IASSA Honorary Lifetime Membership

During the ICASS X meetings in June 2021, Dr. Piers Vitebsky was awarded an Honorary Lifetime Membership by the International Arctic Social Sciences Association (IASSA).

This very prestigious award is some small marker of the esteem with which Piers is held by the Arctic social sciences and humanities community. The presentation to Piers was made virtually, and a number of SPRI colleagues joined an international audience to reflect on Piers's career and celebrate his achievements.

Moran Professorship of Conservation and Development

The Board of Electors to the Moran Professorship of Conservation and Development invite applications for this Professorship from persons whose work falls within the general field of the Professorship to take up appointment on 1st January 2022 or as soon as possible thereafter.

Candidates will have an outstanding research record of international stature focusing on the challenges of biodiversity conservation, especially in rich biodiverse regions in the Global South, and a demonstrable ability to work across the social and natural sciences to understand conservation challenges and solutions.

Mapping glacier surface debris thickness across high mountain Asia

PhD student Karla Boxall and supervisor Ian Willis have mapped the thickness of debris cover on all glaciers in High Mountain Asia. With colleagues from the US and China, they developed a robust statistical relationship between surface temperature and the few existing field measurements of debris thickness. Using regional scale thermal imagery, they applied that relationship to map debris thickness across all 134,770 glaciers in the region. Their map of debris thickness is as accurate and more precise than one already in the literature.

They also determine the controls on the distribution of debris thickness across glaciers showing that thicker debris typically occurs on flatter, west-facing slopes at lower elevations, where ice flow is slower.

Debris thickness contributes to the rate at which glaciers melt, so these findings have important implications for modelling the future behaviour of glaciers in this region.