Quaternary Environmental Change in the Tropics (eBook)

Sarah Metcalfe is Professor of Earth and Environmental Dynamics at the University of Nottingham, UK. She has published extensively on environmental change in Latin America, with a particular focus on Mexico. Although primarily a palaeolimnologist, her approach is very much multi-proxy, including the use of historical and instrumental records to help to improve our understanding of recent change. David Nash is Professor of Physical Geography at the University of Brighton, UK. He is widely known for his publications on the reconstruction of historical climate changes in southern Africa, as well as his broader research into the contemporary and Quaternary geomorphology of dryland regions including the Kalahari, Atacama and southern Europe. His research uses methods ranging from scanning electron microscopy and thin-section analysis to the interpretation of historical documents.

Outline of Contents

Section A: Global contexts.

1. Introduction - Sarah Metcalfe and David Nash.

2. Contemporary climatology of the Tropics - Stefan Hastenrath.


Section B: Regional climatic changes.

3. Tropical oceans -Jan-Berend Stuut and Stefan Mulitza.

4. Africa - David Nash and Michael Meadows.

5. Americas and Caribbean - Sarah Metcalfe and Mark Bush
6. China and Southeast Asia - Dan Penny.

7. India, the Middle East and Arabia - Ashok Singhvi and Ken Glennie.

8. Australasia and the Pacific Islands - Peter Kershaw.


Section C: Global syntheses.

9. Modelling of Tropical environments during the Quaternary - author to be confirmed.

10. Quaternary environmental changes in the Tropics: a global synthesis - Sarah Metcalfe and David Nash

"All in all, Quaternary Environmental Change in the Tropics provides a concise overview of the current knowledge of tropical quaternary climate. As such, it will be a very useful textbook for scholars focussing on this topic, but at the same time, it brings to light the poor record of Early and Middle Pleistocene tropical climate." (Geological Journal, 1 March 2016)