INSTAAR: Mark Meier

Fellow Emeritus of INSTAAR; Professor Emeritus of Geological Sciences, Univ. of Colorado at Boulder.

PhD, California Institute of Technology, 1957.

meiermf@spot.colorado.edu
(303) 492-6556

INSTAAR Directorate Members

Specialty: Glaciology, Global Change

General Research Interests: Glaciers in the Earth system, causes and projections of sea-level change, iceberg calving, surging and calving glaciers, climate change, and global change in general. Note: Dr Meier is semi-retired and cannot accept graduate students.

Current research: focuses on the relation between changes in land ice on global sea level, the Earth’s gravity field and water balance, both at the present and that to be expected with the "greenhouse" warming of the atmosphere. Other research interests include use of scaling techniques to infer global distributions of glacier area, thickness and other parameters; geophysical impacts on Earth of ice growth and wastage; snow, glacier, and mountain hydrology; the response of glaciers to climate change; and remote sensing of ice and snow.

Outstanding Awards: Goldthwait Polar Medal, Byrd Polar Research Center; Robert E. Horton Medal, American Geophysical Union; International Prize in Hydrology (IAHS/WMO/UNESCO); Seligman Crystal, International Glaciological Society; Distinguished Service Award (Gold Medal), U.S. Department of the Interior; other medals and honors.

Selected Publications:

Dyurgerov, M. B. and Meier, M. F., 2000: Twentieth century climate change: Evidence from small glaciers. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 97(4), 1406-1411.
Bahr, D. B. and Meier, M. F., 2000: Snow patch and glacier size distribution. Water Resources Res. 36(2), 495-501.
Meier, M. F., 2002: Glaciers. In Encyclopedia of Global Environmental Change, vol.1: The Earth System (MacCracken, M. C. and Perry, J. S., Eds), J. Wiley & Son., Chichester, 404-410.
Meier, M. F. And Wahr, J., 2002: Sea level is rising - do we know why? Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 99(10), 6524-6526.
Meier, M. F. and Dyurgerov, M. B, 2002: Sea level changes - How Alaska affects the world. Science. 297, 350-351.
Meier, M. F., Dyurgerov, M. B., McCabe, G. J. 2003: The health of glaciers - Recent changes in glacier regime. Climate Dynamics. 59: 123-135.. Kluwer.
Meier, M. F., 2003: Glaciers and sea level: New approaches to an old problem. in Funk. M. (Ed), Milestones in Physical Glaciology. From the Pioneers to a Modern Science, in honor of Prof. Dr. Hans Röthlisberger. Mitt. d. Versuchsanstalt f. Wasserbau, Hydrologie u. Glaziologie, Eidg. Tech. Hochschule, Zürich.
Dyurgerov, M. B. and Meier, M. F., 2004: Glaciers and the Study of Climate and Sea-level Change. Chap. 16 in Bamber and Payne (Eds). Mass Balance of the Cryosphere. Cambridge Univ. Press.

See Also:

Mark F. Meier