BIO
Carl Wunsch (Brooklyn, New York, United States, 1941) earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics (1962) and a PhD in geophysics (1966) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His academic and research career has largely been spent at this institution, where he began as a professor of Oceanography in 1967, served as chair of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences from 1977 to 1981, and is now Cecil & Ida Green Professor Emeritus of Physical Oceanography. Wunsch is also an Associate in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University, having worked there in a visiting capacity for the previous ten years. He has also held visiting positions at the universities of Washington and Princeton, the California Institute of Technology, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge in the United Kingdom, and, in France, the Space Geodesy Research Group (GRGS), a public research consortium. Author or co-author of approximately 300 published papers and five books, he has chaired the Ocean Studies Board of the National Academy of Sciences and NASA’s Altimetry Science Working Group (TOPEX), as well as the International Steering Group of the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) under the World Climate Research Programme.
CONTRIBUTION
The awardee researcher “had the early insight that the ocean plays a central role in regulating Earth’s climate,” reads the Frontiers citation. Guided by this insight, he developed the innovative methods that allow scientists to precisely quantify the state of the ocean under a changing climate, and, in doing so, “demonstrated the need for a global ocean observing system,” able to integrate observations of a diverse nature, made from space or from inside the ocean.
Wunsch himself would lead pioneering scientific projects aimed at measuring and analyzing the effects of global warming using newly available technologies like satellite images taken from space. His work, as such, “has been instrumental in the design of ongoing global ocean observation programs, which underpin current estimates of an alarming increase in ocean heat content in response to increasing greenhouse gases.”
His approach, said the committee, “emphasizes the importance of international cooperation to solve global problems,” as instantiated by the various international projects he himself instigated and led. It also “epitomizes the power of collaborative science to answer fundamental questions on the future trajectory of the climate system, and its consequences for life on the planet.”
