For the past four years, CGRER has been holding a seminar series at the University of Iowa, featuring a diversity of speakers from inside and outside of the university. Speakers have covered a variety of topics: the 1992 Earth Summit, climate change and human acclimatization to extreme environments, air quality in India, remote sensing techniques, the mammoths of Siberia -- and several others relating to the many aspects of global change.

One of this year's distinguished speakers was Eric Barron, who spoke on "Water and Global Change" this past September. Barron, a professor at Pennsylvania State University where he is Director of the Earth System Science Center, is also the American Geophysical Union's representative to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which includes members from around the world, and a member of two National Research Council committees on global change. While in Iowa, Barron presented a short course entitled "Climate Model Applications in Paleoenvironmental Analysis" to 19 people from a diversity of UI departments and the Iowa and Illinois Geological Survey Bureaus.

Gene Shoemaker, recently retired from the U.S. Geological Survey, and Carolyn Shoemaker, a planetary astronomer, are scheduled to come to campus in April, 1996. The Shoemakers are jointly well-known for their discoveries of numerous comets and asteroids, work for which they have received many awards. Most recently they have received much attention for the discovery and observation of a comet's 1994 crash into Jupiter; for their speculation about the effects on life forms of similar past crashes onto Earth; and for their predictions of similar future events.

Perhaps the CGRER seminars' most renown speaker has been Paul Crutzen, who visited campus in 1993 and spoke on ozone loss and human-induced changes in the atmosphere's chemistry. Professor Crutzen, of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry (jointly with two others) for his pioneering work on depletion of the ozone layer by nitrogen oxides. One of the Nobel Prize joint recipients, Mario Molina, is planning to visit CGRER next year. In 1991, CGRER member and co-director Greg Carmichael spent a sabbatical semester with Crutzen at his laboratory in Mainz, Germany.

In addition, CGRER's own co-director Jerry Schnoor received the honor of being asked to present the University of Iowa's Thirteenth Annual Presidential Lecture on February 4. He used the opportunity once again to bring global change issues to the forefront in a talk entitled, "Eco-logic: An Environmental Perspective for the 21st Century." After walking his listeners through many of the environmental problems that face us today and presenting examples from his own research, Jerry delineated what he considers to be a reasonable approach to dealing with the dilemmas that we now face. Look for his synthesis in a future issue of IoWatch.

You can keep up-to-date on our seminar speakers by checking our home page on the World Wide Web http://www.cgrer.uiowa.edu/seminars