Lonnie Thompson, winner of the Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Climate Change for ice-core studies evidencing the unprecedented nature of today’s global warming, has died at age 78

Together with his wife and colleague Ellen Mosley-Thompson, Lonnie Thompson built an extensive library of past climate histories by analyzing the air trapped in the depths of Earth’s ice fields, with samples obtained by drilling and extracting cylindrical ice cores. The resulting ice record extends back 800,000 years at the poles – the case of samples taken in Antarctica from 3,200-meter boreholes – and up to 20,000 years in high mountain glaciers. And analysis of the cores confirmed that current atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases are without precedent in our planet’s past.

The laureates’ work placed current climate change in the context of natural climate variability, including in tropical and mid-latitude areas where such long records were not previously available. Climate has shown to be changeable at geological scales of thousands of years, but as their data showed, the current change stands outside any previous range, and is not natural but human-driven. The most obvious evidence of this, highlighted by the committee granting them the Frontiers of Knowledge award, is that the glaciers the Thompsons studied over the space of four decades are now disappearing.

Lonnie Thompson was a pioneer in the study of high mountain ice masses that can only be reached by means of logistically complex expeditions. He led around fifty expeditions to high mountain glaciers in the Himalayas, Kilimanjaro and the Andes, including one to Huascarán, among the highest peaks in the Peruvian Andes, where he and his team battled extreme high mountain conditions, with perpetual snow and low oxygen levels, to successfully extract an ice core of 471 meters.

Lessons from the past for 21st-century humanity

“Glaciers serve both as recorders of the past climate and indicators of today’s,” said Thompson in an interview after hearing of the Frontiers Award. “In the bubbles of their ice we have the history of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide – all the gases we are concerned about for the next 100 years.”

He recalled that when they began their expeditions, back in the 1970s, “climate change was not an issue.” But what their work established was that glaciers “were not only retreating but the retreat was accelerating.”

Hence Thompson’s insistence that what the ice cores revealed about the impact of past climate change held important lessons about the severity of human-induced warming. “Today’s climate change is a global phenomenon. Every part of the planet will feel its impact, and we all still rely for our survival on agriculture and livestock farming. All that is imperiled by climate change.”

The scientist saw an alarming gap between the seriousness of climate change as revealed by science, and international political inaction in the face of this defining challenge of our time: “We need leaders who work for the public interest, but unfortunately there are lots of economic interests that are embedded in political systems around the world. So it is important to get the message across that climate change will impact all of us, all our economies, very negatively indeed.”

But despite the scale of the challenge and the obstacles to getting the right anti-climate change measures in place, Thompson was confident in human beings’ willingness to cooperate when times get tough: “Our scientific expeditions to remote parts of the world, crewed by people from many countries, including the U.S., Russia and China, prove that it is possible to join forces and accomplish the mission, even in the harshest conditions. And that is exactly what will have to happen if we are going to deal effectively with climate change.”

Bio notes

Lonnie G. Thompson (Gassaway, West Virginia, United States, 1948) completed a BS in Geology at Marshall University in 1970. After marrying Ellen Mosley-Thompson, he moved to The Ohio State University (OSU), where he received an MS in Geological Sciences in 1973 and a PhD in the same subject in 1976. He has remained at OSU for the rest of his career, as full professor since 1994 and currently as Distinguished University Professor in the School of Earth Sciences and Senior Research Scientist in the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center. He was also Adjunct Professor at the Center for Excellence in Tibetan Plateau Earth Sciences and Co-director of Academics with the Tibetan Plateau Research Institute, both in Beijing (China).

He led over 60 ice-core drilling expeditions in 16 countries, from China to Peru by way of Russia, Tanzania and Indonesia, in a forty-year career that saw him receive almost 80 research grants and publish more than 260 peer-reviewed papers. A member of the Advisory Board of National Science Review (Oxford Academic), published under the auspices of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, he also served on advisory committees for the likes of the U.S. National Research Council, the Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences, China’s Ministry of Science and Technology and the Max Planck Society (Berlin, Germany). Among his many distinctions was the National Medal of Science, the highest honor the U.S. awards to American scientists.