Retired Professor focus of Newsweek article
Terry Hughes, recently retired Professor of Earth Sciences and long-time member of the Climate Change Institute, is the focus of an article in Newsweek published June 5. The article describes the current scientific views about the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet and the consequent significant sea level rise. Back in 1973, Terry was one of the first to predict the instability of the region. He followed that up in 1981 with a paper considering the mechanisms that could lead to collapse in more detail. Both of those papers relied on relatively coarse data sets. Two recent papers, published last month in Science and Geophysical Research Letters, used much larger data sets that have recently become available to analyze the stability of West Antarctica. Their conclusions support Terry’s original ideas.