Thompson Webb III is an American paleoclimatologist and paleoecologist known for his research on past climate change and vegetation history during the late Quaternary period. He served as a professor at Brown University from 1972 to 2005, then as a Professor Emeritus of Geological Sciences. His work has contributed to understanding long-term climate patterns as inferred from fossil pollen data, lake-level records, and climate modeling.

Early life and education

Webb’s interest in paleontology and the study of the past began in 1958 when he participated in a fossil-hunting field trip across the western United States led by Raymond Alf, a teacher at the Webb Schools in Claremont, California, a school founded by Webb's grandfather. In 1961, he was selected to participate in an NSF-sponsored summer science program at Michigan State University, where he added to his education about geology and fossils before enrolling as an undergraduate at Swarthmore College and earning a Bachelor of Arts degree with honors in botany in 1966. He later pursued graduate studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison under the direction of climate scientists, Reid Bryson and John Kutzbach, and received a Ph.D. in meteorology in 1971. His doctoral dissertation focused on reconstructing late-Quaternary climate events in Wisconsin and Minnesota using multivariate statistical analysis to interpret fossil pollen data.

Career

Early career and research

Following his doctoral studies, Webb held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Michigan from 1970 to 1971. He then worked as an assistant research paleo ecologist at the university's Great Lakes Research Division in the pollen lab directed by Margaret B. Davis, his advisor. His postdoctoral research advanced the theory of pollen analysis by showing how well maps of pollen data reflected the vegetation patterns across lower Michigan.

In 1972, Webb joined the Department of Geological Sciences (now the Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences) at Brown University as an assistant professor. During this time, he began collaborating with scientists, including John Imbrie, on studies of Quaternary climate change.

CLIMAP and paleoclimate research

Webb became involved in the CLIMAP (Climate: Long-Range Investigation, Mapping, and Prediction) project in the early 1970s. His work added a terrestrial perspective to the project, which had previously focused mainly on ocean-based climate data. For testing the climate-model-simulations of the last gracial maximum 21,000 years ago, he and co-workers assembled a gloral data base of past vegetation and land-based climate indicators, which were then mapped and compared to the model results.

COHMAP Project

In 1977, Webb with John Kutzbach at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Herbert Wright and Edward Cushing at the University of Minnesota organized the Cooperative Holocene Mapping Project (COHMAP), a large international, interdisciplinary, and interinstitutional research effort. The project compared geological and biological evidence of past climates with climate-model simulations and showed how the changing atmospheric boundary-conditions of seasonal insolation and retreating ice sheets altered monsoonal and high-latitude temperature and moisture conditions, which in turn caused changes in the vegetation and lake levels. The differing changes among seasonal temperatures and moisture led to past climates much different from today which in turn led to vegetation assemblages that do not exist today. Webb’s work mapping the changing plant distributions in North America supported Margaret Davis’ conclusions about the differing independent migration patterns among plant taxa.

Throughout the 1980s and up to 1994, Webb helped lead annual COHMAP meetings at the University of Wisconsin-Madison to coordinate cooperation among the interdisciplinary group of students and researchers. Major findings from this project’s work were published in over 200 scientific journal articles, including Science in 1988, and were later summarized in a collaborative book (1993) and a special issue of Quaternary Science Reviews (1998).

Later career and hurricane research

In 1996, Webb began research on the sedimentary record of hurricanes with his then PhD. student, Jeffrey Donnelly. This work focused on identifying evidence of past landfalling hurricanes from geological records going back a thousand years or more.

Academic appointments

Webb gained tenure in 1979, was promoted to full professor at Brown University in 1984 and continued teaching and research there until his retirement in 2005. After retiring, he enjoyed teaching middle-school students about the weather through summer and continuing studies programs at Brown until 2013.

Webb held several academic and research positions throughout his career, including:

Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Michigan (1970–1971) Assistant Research Paleoecologist, University of Michigan (1971–1972) Assistant Professor (Research), Brown University (1972–1975) Associate Professor, Brown University (1975–1984) Professor, Brown University (1984–2005) Professor Emeritus, Brown University (2006– )

He also held visiting and fellowship positions at institutions such as the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Cambridge, the University of Colorado, and Harvard University.

Awards and honors

Visiting Fellowship at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge (1977–1978) CIRES Fellowship, University of Colorado (1988–1989) Elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1991) Bullard Fellowship, Harvard University (1995–1996) Ermine Cowles Case Memorial Lecture in Paleontology, University of Michigan (1996) William S. Cooper Award of the Ecological Society of America (2004) Distinguished Career Award, American Quaternary Association (2006) Joseph Shane Award, Swarthmore College (2011)

Selected books

Delcourt, P. A., H. R. Delcourt, and T. Webb III. 1984. Atlas of paired isophyte and isopoll maps for important eastern North American tree taxa. The American Association of Stratigraphic Palynologists, Inc., Contribution Series No. 14, 131 pp. Webb, T., III and J.-M. Dubois (eds.). 1985. Tendances climatiques l'Holocene en Amerique du Nord. Gèographie physique et Quaternaire 39, no. 2:113-226. Webb, T., III. 1985. A Global Paleoclimatic Data Base for 6000 yr B.P. Final Report for DOE Contract DE-AC02-79EV10097, TRO18, Carbon Dioxide Research Division, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Office of Energy Research, U.S. Dept. of Energy, Washington, D.C. (available from N.T.I.S., Springfield, VA 22161). 155 pp. Huntley, B. and T. Webb III (eds.) 1988. Vegetation History. Vol. 7 in Handbook of Vegetation Science. Kluwer Academic Publ., Dordrecht, The Netherlands, (803 p.). Wright, H.E., Jr., J.E. Kutzbach, T. Webb III, W.F. Ruddiman, F.A. Street-Perrott, and P.J. Bartlein (eds.) 1993. Global Climates Since the Last Glacial Maximum. Univ. of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. (569 p.). Webb, T., III (ed.) 1998. Late Quaternary Climates: Data Syntheses and Model Experiments. Quaternary Science Reviews 17, Nos. 6-7: 465-688. Williams, J. W., B. Shuman, P. J. Bartlein, J. Whitmore, K. Gajewski, M. Sawada, T. Minckley, S. Shafer, A. E. Viau, T. Webb, III, P. M. Anderson, L. B. Brubaker, C. Whitlock, and O. K. Davis. 2006. An Atlas of Pollen-Vegetation-Climate Relationships for the United States and Canada. American Association of Stratigraphic Palynologists Foundation, Dallas, TX. 293 pp.

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