Chapman Chair Seminars to feature talks on sea level rise
February 22, 2018
The College of Natural Science and Mathematics is hosting a series of invited speakers
to discuss sea-level rise and coastal impacts, including a senior fellow from the
NASA Goddard Flight Center, along with six University of Alaska Fairbanks researchers.
The talks are part of the college’s Chapman Chair Seminars. The UAF and Fairbanks
community can attend the free seminars during the afternoons of Feb. 26, Feb. 28 and
March 2, in the Elvey Building, Room 214, on the UAF campus. A full schedule is available
online at cnsm.uaf.edu/chapman-chair.
Seminar topics include how scientists can help decision makers use scientific knowledge;
whether mountain glaciers matter to sea-level rise; and the causes and consequences
for sea-level variations in the Arctic Ocean.
The invited speakers are:
Robert Bindschadler: After working 30 years with NASA, Bindschadler retired in 2010 as the chief scientist
of NASA’s Hydrospheric and Biospheric Sciences Laboratory. He is also a senior fellow
of the Goddard Space Flight Center.
Bodo Bookhagen: Bookhagen leads the geological remote sensing group at the University of Potsdam
in Germany. He uses a combination of fieldwork, field measurements and remote-sensing
data to quantify fluxes of water and sediment on the Earth’s surface.
Matthias Mengel: Mengel is a researcher at Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact who investigates the
dynamics of the Antarctic ice sheet and its link to global sea-level change.
The UAF speakers are glaciologist Regine Hock, geophysicist Jeff Freymueller, coastal
scientist Chris Maio, oceanographer Igor Polyakov, glacier and ice sheet modeler Andy
Aschwanden and natural resource specialist Stefan Tangen.
Mathematical physicist Jürgen Kurths is the current Sydney Chapman Endowed Chair of
Physical Sciences. He is hosting the seminar series with Regine Hock, a CNSM professor
of geophysics and a Geophysical Institute researcher.
The Alaska State Legislature created the Sydney Chapman Endowed Chair of Physical
Sciences in 1983 as the first endowed chair in the University of Alaska system. The
position gives students and faculty a chance to learn from distinguished researchers
who are pioneers in the physical sciences.