Environmental setting of the Antarctic Peninsula

Perhaps nowhere on the surface of the earth have environmental changes taken place with such rapidity and captured the interest of such a diverse community than those observed across the Antarctic Peninsula in the last 10 years. Wholesale decay of ice shelves, long considered to be the harbinger of climate warming, has spurred interest in our attempts to understand the interaction of earth systems on historical to millennial time scales. Because such changes in the cryosphere also impact regional ecosystems the biological community has also become deeply involved in the climate debate. While environmental changes now taking place across the Antarctic Peninsula are historically well documented by a diverse set of meteorological and remote sensing data, considerably less is known concerning the behavior of the atmosphere-ocean-cryosphere system during the past 10,000 years (the interglacial Holocene Epoch). The first purpose of this volume is to integrate our present understanding of current meteorological trends and compare them to records of past environmental change. The hope is that such a comparison will stimulate future studies that are directed at deciphering the key forcing mechanisms operating across the Antarctic Peninsula so that natural signals can be understood within the context of potential anthropogenic changes. The second key objective of the volume is to help further our understanding of how the paleoenvironmental archives are interpreted and what archives need to be acquired. Clearly progress toward both goals must be achieved together. We also hope that the volume will serve as a useful reference for students and senior investigators.