William Richard Peltier, Ph.D., D.Sc. (hc) [1] (born 1943), is university professor of physics at the University of Toronto. He is director of the Centre for Global Change Science [2], past principal investigator of the Polar Climate Stability Network [3], and the scientific director of Canada's largest supercomputer centre, SciNet [4]. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, of the American Geophysical Union, of the American Meteorological Society, and of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters..

His research interests include: atmospheric and oceanic waves and turbulence, geophysical fluid dynamics, physics of the planetary interior, and planetary climate.

He is notable for his seminal contributions to the understanding of the dynamics of the deep Earth, both concerning the nature of the mantle convection process and the circulation of the visco-elastic interior caused by the loading of the surface by continental scale ice sheet loads. His gravitationally self-consistent global theory of Ice-Earth-Ocean interactions has become widely employed internationally in the explanation of the changes of sea level that accompany both the growth and decay of grounded ice on the continents, both during the Late Quaternary era of Earth history and under modern global warming conditions. His models of the space-time variations of continental ice cover since the last maximum of glaciation are employed universally to provide the boundary conditions needed to enable modern coupled climate models to be employed to reconstruct past climate conditions. A most notable contribution to work of this kind has been his theory of the so-called Dansgaard-Oeschger millennial timescale oscillation of glacial climate. He has been the primary contributor to the global reconstructions ICE-3G,^[1] ICE-4G,^[2] ICE-5G (VM2),^[3] and the most recent ICE-6G (VM5)model. These models are important for the quantification of post-glacial rebound and late Pleistocene to Holocene variations in sea level.

Education

• 1967 B.Sc., University of British Columbia
• 1969 M.Sc. in Physics, University of Toronto
• 1971 Ph.D. in Physics, University of Toronto

Teaching appointments

• 1971-72 Lecturer, Department of Physics, University of Toronto
• 1973-74 Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Physics, University of Toronto
• 1974-77 Associate Professor, Department of Physics, University of Toronto
• 1978 Visiting Professor, Geophysics and Space Physics, U.C.L.A.
• 1978-79 Steacie Fellowship Leave, NCAR, Boulder, Colorado
• 1977-79 Associate Professor, Department of Physics, University of Toronto
• 1979-93 Full Professor, Department of Physics, University of Toronto
• 1987-88 Guggenheim Fellowship Leave, DAMTP and Bullard Laboratories, Cambridge University, U.K.
• 1993- University Professor, University of Toronto
• 2002-2003 Sabbatical Leave, Professeur Invité, Institute de Physique du Globe de Paris, Université Paris VII
• 2004 Professor Invité, Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, Université Paris VII
• 2005–present Adjunct professor, Dept. of Earth Sciences, University of Waterloo
• 2006 Visiting professor, Dept. of Earth Sciences and Bjerknes center for Marine Research, University of Bergen, Norway
• 2009 Professeur Invite Ecole Normale Superieure, Paris, 2009

Notable publications

• Mass balance of the Antarctic Ice Sheet from 1992 to 2017
• Mass balance of the Greenland Ice Sheet from 1992 to 2018
• The Antarctica component of postglacial rebound model ICE-6G_C (VM5a) based on GPS positioning, exposure age dating of ice thicknesses, and relative sea level histories
• Space geodesy constrains ice age terminal deglaciation: The global ICE-6G_C (VM5a) model
• Comment on "An Assessment of the ICE-6G_C (VM5a) Glacial Isostatic Adjustment Model" by Purcell et al.
• Global glacial ice volume and Last Glacial Maximum duration from an extended Barbados sea level record
• The modern and glacial overturning circulation in the Atlantic Ocean in PMIP coupled model simulations
• Palaeoclimate
• High tide of the warm Pliocene: Implications of global sea level for Antarctic deglaciation
• A data-calibrated distribution of deglacial chronologies for the North American ice complex from glaciological modeling
• The angular velocities of the plates and the velocity of Earth's centre from space geodesy

Honours and awards

• Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship, 1977-1979
• E.W.R. Steacie Memorial fellowship, 1978-1980
• Kirk Bryan Award Geological Society of America
• Killam Senior Research Fellowship Canada Council for the Arts. 1980-1982
• Fellow of the American Geophysical Union, 1986-
• Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, 1986-
• John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, 1986-1988
• Fellow of Clare Hall, Cambridge University, 1988-
• Senior fellow of Massey College University of Toronto, 1989-
• Fellow of the American Meteorological Society, 1991-
• Patterson Medal of the Atmospheric Environment Service of Canada, 1992
• Appointment to the rank of university professor, highest rank at the University of Toronto, 1993-
• Distinguished Lecturer of the Canadian Geophysical Union, 1999–2000
• Science Watch listing as the fifth most highly cited earth scientists in the world, all disciplines included, 2001
• Elected as Foreign Member to Fellowship in the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, 2004^[4]
• Bancroft Award of the Royal Society of Canada, 2004
• J. Tuzo Wilson Medal of the Canadian Geophysical Union, 2004
• Vetlesen Prize, the G. Unger Vetlesen Foundation of New York, 2004
• Leiv Erikson Fellow, Norwegian Research Council, Bjerknes Institute for Climate Research, Univ. of Bergen, 2006
• Miroslaw Romanowski Medal of the Royal Society of Canada, 2006
• Milutin Milankovic Medal of the European Geosciences Union, 2008^[5] web announcement
• CAP Gold medal for Achievement in Physics Canadian Association of Physicists, 2009
• Charles A. Whitten Medal American Geophysical Union, 2010
• The Bower Award and Prize for Achievement in Science - Earth Systems Franklin Institute of Philadelphia, 2010
• The Gerhard Herzberg Canada Gold Medal in Science and Engineering Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, 2011
• Killam Prize in Natural Science Canada Council for the Arts, 2012
• W. A. Johnston Award from the Canadian Quaternary Association (CANQUA), 2018
• Gold Medal and Fellow of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics (IUGG), 2019