In the past few years, a number of books on paleoclimate have appeared. Quaternary Paleoclimatology is not just another; R. S. Bradley has produced a wellwritten, succinct, well-researched synthesis of many areas of current activity in paleoclimatic research.
The first one-fourth of Quaternary Paleoclimatology is devoted to principles of climate and climatic variation and to dating methods, including radiocarbon, potassium -argon, uranium, thermoluminescence, fission track, paleomagnetism, amino-acid, obsidian hydration, tephrochronology, and lichenometry. While the dating section may seem out of place in a volume about past climates, Bradley has intertwined the two well, providing the reader with fresh insight into both.
Fifty pages are devoted to the role of ice cores in paleoclimatology. More than 80 ice cores greater than 100 m in length have been recovered from polar ice caps and ice sheets of the world. Bradley brings together information on their dating and results from isotope, gas, particulate, and nitrate ion analyses.
Paleoclimatic evidence from the marine record, such as oxygen isotope, microfossil, and mineral assemblage analyses, is given. The brief discussion of marine evidence on causes and mechanisms of glaciation and deglaciation is interesting. Other well-summarized topics include periglacial features, snowlines, mountain glacier fluctuations, lake-levels, speleothems, plant macrofossils, treelines, and insects; the brief, informative essay on tropical biogeography could, however, be expanded. The topics of pollen analysis, dendroclimatology, and the use of historical data in climatic reconstruction are each separate chapters. The bibliography, 43 pages long and dominated by recent titles, is virtually a catalog of current Quaternary paleoclimatic research in North America.
Although it may be unfair to criticize a book on what it does not do, the reader will want to be aware of some excluded topics. Perhaps most visibly absent is the contribution to paleoclimate by vertebrate and molluscan studies. Vertebrate faunal analysts, such as Hibbard, Lundelius, Semken, and Graham, to name a few, have a long history of important contributions to Quaternary paleoclimates. Molluscan workers, such as Taylor, Miller, Metcalf, Neck, and many others, provide insights to terrestrial paleoclimates that cannot be easily obtained by specialists in other fields. Also, ethnozoological and ethnobotanical aspects are ignored, as is prehistoric cultural ecology. While in some cases less subject to the rigors and methods of laboratory instrumentation these topics, as well, are suitable for consideration in Quaternary paleoclimatic reconstruction.
Geomorphology is another broad area absent from the book. By its exclusion, the reader of Quaternary Paleoclimatology may get the wrong signal that the study of landforms, soils, alluvium, eolian deposits, karst deposits, and colluvium is less important or less romantic. Each area of investigation, of course, included in the book or excluded, has its own methods, limitations, and special contribution to paleoclimatology.