Antarctic Climate Evolution, Second Edition, enhances our understanding of the history of the world's largest ice sheet, and how it responded to and influenced climate change during the Cenozoic. It includes terrestrial and marine geology, sedimentology, glacier geophysics and ship-borne geophysics, coupled with results from numerical ice sheet and climate modeling. The book's content largely mirrors the structure of the Past Antarctic Ice Sheets (PAIS) program (www.scar.org/science/pais), formed to investigate past changes in Antarctica by supporting multidisciplinary global research. This new edition reflects recent advances and is updated with several new chapters, including those covering marine and terrestrial life changes, ice shelves, advances in numerical modeling, and increasing coverage of rates of change. The approach of the PAIS program has led to substantial improvement in our knowledge base of past Antarctic change and our understanding of the factors that have guided its evolution.

This is the first book dedicated to the developing knowledge on how the world's largest ice sheet formed and changed over its 34 million years history. In explaining the story of Antartica, information on terrestrial and marine geology, sedimentology, glacier geophysics (including airborne reconnaissance), shipborne geophysics, and numerical ice sheet and climate modelling, will be interwoven within eleven chapters, each deling with an important historical theme. The approach will be to first 'set the scene', involving chapters dedicated to how ice sheets and their glacial history can be measured. This opening section will provide information necessary to comprehend the latter section of the book, in which five chapters will related the glacial and climate evolution of Antartica during the most important time-frames in which changes have occurred.
* An overview of antarctic climate change, analysing historical, present day and future developments
* Contributions from leading experts and scholars from around the world
* Informs and updates climate change scientists and experts in related areas of study