Richard Alley, Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences, has been elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society, the national academy of science in the United Kingdom, for improving natural knowledge.
The Royal Society annually elects up to 52 Fellows from citizens of the United Kingdom and commonwealth countries and up to 10 Foreign Members. The Society's fundamental purpose, reflected in its founding Charters of the 1660s, is to recognize, promote and support excellence in science and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity.
The Statutes of the Royal Society require selection of Foreign Members from among persons of the greatest eminence for their scientific discoveries and attainments.
Alley was selected for his outstanding contributions to the study of ice, its interactions with the landscape and its link to climate. His work includes grain-scale physics controlling ice deformation, the role and nature of ice streams and processes at the bed of the ice sheet. He synthesized the evidence that abrupt climate changes occurred in the past and works on their cause and the role ice plays on ocean circulation.
He is also recognized by the Society as an outstanding science communicator.
Alley will be admitted to the Society on Admission Day, July 11, in London. Admission Day will be preceded by two days of a New Fellow Seminar.