AuI hosts virtual meeting

Iota Sigma Pi: Aurum Iodide Chapter

Announcement for September 2025 Meeting – Virtual

Friday, September 5, 2025

David Archer, Ph.D.

Department of the Geophysical Sciences, University of Chicago

" The chemistry of carbon in earth’s climate system"

Meeting Agenda

• 7:00 PM (CST) - Speaker

• 8:00 PM Social hour (via breakout rooms)

Abstract: This talk will be a flyover summary of some of the wonderous chemistry of carbon in the earth system, with topics like the bending vibrational mode of CO2 and its impact on Earth’s temperature, the carbonate pH-buffer system in seawater and in our blood, the CaCO3 “snowline” whole-ocean pH-regulating system, and the silicate weathering CO2 thermostat system that regulates Earth’s climate on geological time scales, and will clean up our fossil fuel CO2 but only very slowly, over maybe a million years.  Which leaves a last question we will consider whether we could remove our waste CO2 from the atmosphere.

Bio: David Archer is a professor in the Department of the Geophysical Sciences at the University of Chicago and a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, working on models of Earth’s carbon cycle and its interaction with global climate, topics such as fossil fuel neutralization by CaCO3, methane hydrate formation, ocean mercury cycling, and the deep future of the global warming climate change event. Dr. Archer has written a series of books on climate change, including Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast, a text for non-science major undergraduates now in second edition; The Long Thaw: How Humans are Changing the Next 100,000 Years of Earth’s Climate; The Global Carbon Cycle, a primer in climate science; and The Warming Papers: The Scientific Foundation for the Climate Change Forecast. He teaches classes on Environmental chemistry and Earth’s climate evolution.

Please RSVP by Thursday, September 4, 2025 to gshearerdgs@gmail.com.  The meeting link will be sent to you on Thursday, Sept 4, 2025.