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Five minutes with Dr. Wallace Broecker

Closed-basin lake research is a subject near and dear to Wallace Broecker’s heart. The world-renowned geochemist earned his Ph.D. in the 1950s by writing his thesis on Pyramid and Walker Lakes in Northern Nevada. More than 50 years and a multitude of research topics later, he is still studying closed-basin lakes and their ability to predict the future of water availability world wide as the global climate warms.

As part of a large-scale study on closed-basin lakes in places like Argentina, Africa and parts of Asia, Broecker says such research supports existing studies in the Great Basin. “Some of the best scientists in the world live near the Great Basin, but we’re trying to see the big picture,” he said. “The Dead Sea in the Middle East has the same history as Lake Lahontan in Northern Nevada. We’re studying closed-basin lakes at the same latitude in the Asian desert, but so far the information is very thin.”

Broecker said one of the world’s most prominent modelers of climate change has made a claim that rainfall on the planet will become more concentrated in the tropics, leaving those areas outside the tropics even drier. “The best indicator of how precipitation has changed is these lakes because they have no outlet,” he said. “My study is to see whether we can use past records of lake sizes to predict the outcome. Indeed, the studies indicate the prediction is correct.”

Broecker will deliver the keynote address at the International Symposium on Terminus Lakes at the University of Nevada, Reno, co-hosted by the DRI, the University and the Walker Basin Project Oct. 26 - 29. The subject of his talk, he said, is water availability of the future based on what’s happened in the past.

“When [the climate] was cold, it was wetter and the lakes were bigger,” he said. “As it warms, the lakes get smaller and it gets much drier.”

This is very bad news for the Great Basin, he said. “If we don’t stop putting CO2 in the air, living in the Great Basin in 30 years will be like living in the Sahara.”

The keynote speaker Wallace S. Broecker, Ph.D., a renowned geochemist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and winner of many of the world’s highest awards in science, is the first scientist to sound the alarm about climate change as far back as 1975. He is credited with coining the term “global warming.”