The Plenary Session will be conducted on Monday, May 19, 8:30–10:00 a.m.
Welcome and Opening Remarks. Conference Program Chair Bruce M. Sass, Ph.D. (Battelle)
Keynote Address: "Understanding Climate Change". Lonnie G. Thompson, Ph.D. (The Ohio State University)
Presentation of Student Paper Awards
Keynote Speaker: Lonnie G. Thompson, Ph.D. “Understanding Climate Change”
Lonnie Thompson is one of the world’s foremost authorities on paleoclimatology and glaciology. He is a Distinguished University Professor 
in the Department of Geological Sciences at The Ohio State University and a Senior Research Scientist at OSU’s Byrd Polar Research Center.
Dr. Thompson and his research partner and wife, Ellen Mosley-Thompson, Ph.D., are noted polar and tropical ice researchers. They lead OSU’s Ice Core Paleoclimatological Research Group, which maintains a cold storage room housing the world’s largest collection of tropical ice cores.
Dr. Thompson expanded ice-core paleoclimatology beyond the polar regions to mountain glaciers in the tropical and subtropical zones. His research has focused on the El Niño and monsoon systems that dominate the climate of the tropical Pacific and affect global oceanic and atmospheric circulation patterns. By correlating the paleoclimatological histories contained in ice cores collected from around the world, Dr. Thompson and his team have advanced scientific understanding of the Earth’s climate system. His direct observations of glacier retreat provide clear evidence that the current warming trend is outside the range of climate variability within at least the past 5,000 years.
Dr. Thompson has led more than 50 expeditions, conducting ice-core drilling programs in tropical and subtropical ice fields in the Andes, the Himalayas, and on Mt. Kilimanjaro, as well as in the polar regions. The difficult terrain, low temperatures, and extended periods living at extreme altitudes create many team safety and logistical challenges. Working with engineers in the early 1980s, he and the OSU team developed light-weight, solar-powered drilling equipment that can be transported by humans and pack animals to high elevations not accessible by aircraft or land vehicles. Among the accomplishments of Thompson-led expeditions are the recovery of a 460-meter-long ice core, the world’s longest from a glaciated mountain range (Alaska, 2002); the first tropical ice core (Peru, 1983); and cores containing the entire sequence of the Last Glacial Stage as well as a core with bottom ice more than 750,000 years old, the oldest outside the polar regions (Tibet, 1992). The results of these histories, published in more than 200 articles, have contributed greatly toward understanding the Earth’s past, present, and future climate system. Thompson’s research has resulted in major revisions in the field of paleoclimatology, particularly by demonstrating that tropical regions have undergone significant variability in temperature and precipitation, countering an earlier view that the higher latitudes dominate climate change.
Dr. Thompson’s research has been featured in hundreds of publications, and he and his team are the subject of the 2005 book Thin Ice: Unlocking the Secrets of Climate in the World’s Highest Mountains. He has received numerous honors and awards. In 2005, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and was awarded the John and Alice Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement. In 2007, he received the Roy Chapman Andrews Society’s Distinguished Explorer Award jointly with Ellen Mosley-Thompson, and the Seligman Crystal, the highest professional award in Glaciology. In a presen¬tation ceremony at the White House in July 2007, he received the National Medal of Science, the highest honor that the United States can bestow upon an American scientist.
Dr. Thompson has waived an honorarium for his appearance, instead requesting that the amount be contributed to the OSU Ice Core Salvage Fund.