Page 8 - Earth's Climate Past and Future

About the Author

William F. Ruddiman holds a 1964 undergraduate
degree in geology from Williams College and a 1969
Ph.D. in marine geology from Columbia University.
He worked at the U.S. Naval Oceanographic Office
from 1969 until 1976 and then returned to Columbia’s
Lamont-Doherty Observatory as a Senior Research
Associate. He was Associate Director of the Oceans and
Climate Division from 1982 to 1986 and Adjunct
Professor in the Department of Geology from 1982 to
1991. He moved to the University of Virginia in 1991
as a Professor in the Department of Environmental
Sciences and served as department chair from 1993 to
1996. At Virginia he taught courses in climate change,
physical geology, and marine geology.
Professor Ruddiman’s research interests center on
climate change across several time scales. His early
research with Andrew McIntyre focused on orbital-
scale climate change in and around the north and equa-
torial Atlantic Ocean. He was a member of the
CLIMAP project from 1978 to 1984 and Project
Director from 1980 until 1981. He was a member of the
COHMAP project from 1980 until 1989 and served on
the steering committee throughout that time.
His research in the late 1980s and the 1990s focused
on the longer-term (tectonic-scale) physical and geo-
chemical effects of uplift of the Tibetan Plateau and
other high topography on regional and global climate.
In 1997 he edited a book titled Tectonic Uplift and
Climate Change, published by Plenum Press. His work
on plateau uplift with colleagues Maureen Raymo, John
Kutzbach, and Warren Prell has been featured in BBC Geophysical Union. He has participated in fifteen
and NOVA television documentaries. oceanographic cruises and was co-chief on leg 94 of the
Since 2001, his research has focused on the effects Deep-Sea Drilling Project and leg 108 of the Ocean
of early agriculture on greenhouse-gas concentrations. Drilling Project.
His early anthropogenic hypothesis proposes that He lives on a hillside in the Shenandoah Valley with
releases of carbon dioxide and methane caused by farm- his wife, Ginger, and an ever-changing cast of dogs and
ing drove an anomalous rise in greenhouse-gas concen- cats. His hobbies include rock-wall building, gardening,
trations during the last several thousand years. and walking the Appalachian Mountains, remnants of
Professor Ruddiman is a Fellow of the Geological the continental collisions that produced the superconti-
Society of America and a member of the American nent Pangaea and the rocks now found in his walls.