March 30, 2005

By Fariss Samarrai

Lonnie Thompson, professor of geological sciences at Ohio State University, will present the U.Va. Department of Environmental Sciences Moore Lecture in Clark Hall, Room 108, from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday, March 31. The title of his lecture is “Rapid Climate Change in the Earth System: Present, Past, and Future.” Refreshments will be available at 3:30 p.m.

Thompson, a senior research scientist with the Byrd Polar Research Center, is one of the world’s authorities on the melting of glaciers and ice caps as a warning of rising global temperatures.

He recently won the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, an award regarded by many in the environmental sciences fields as equivalent to the Nobel Prize. Tyler Prize recipients have included some of the world's foremost researchers, including Jane Goodall, E. O. Wilson, Bruce Ames, Thomas Eisner, C. Everett Koop, Thomas Lovejoy, Roger R. Revelle, F. Sherwood Rowland, and Anne and Paul Erlich.

Tyler Prize officials summed up Thompson’s contributions to science saying: “Through his ambitious research endeavors, Dr. Thompson is a leading national spokesman on the subject of global climate change and is considered one of the most respected voices in the world on related policy issues. His scientific research has already impacted, but will continue to influence, the future of the planet and its inhabitants.”

For the past three decades, Thompson, along with his wife and research partner Ellen Mosley-Thompson, have argued that the first real evidence of an increase in global temperatures will come with the melting of tropical ice caps and glaciers.
Within those ice fields, they have argued, are trapped stratigraphic records of ancient climate, some stretching back more than 100,000 years. If the ice fields begin to melt, those historical records will be lost permanently and the clues they might contain to aid contemporary climate prediction would be lost forever.

To rescue those records, Thompson and his team have conducted nearly 50 expeditions to some of the Earth’s most remote places, to drill ice cores and bring them back to Ohio State to extract those climate records. The expeditions, dating back to 1973, have taken him to Antarctica and numerous ice caps on five continents, some as high as 23,600 feet (7,200 meters). He is believed to have spent more time at altitudes above 18,000 feet (5,500 meters) than any other human.

Late last year, Thompson’s research group reported the discovery of beds of preserved plants, uncovered by the retreating Quelccaya ice cap in the Peruvian Andes. The discovery of those plants suggests that the climate in that part of the world has never been warmer in the past 50,000 years than it is today.

In 2002, he was chosen for the Dr. A.H. Heineken Prize for Environmental Sciences and, along with Ellen Mosley-Thompson, was awarded the Common Wealth Award for Distinguished Service for Science and Invention. He also received the Vega Medal in that same year from the Swedish Academy of Science for advances in the field of geography. In 2001, he was named by Time magazine and the Cable News Network as one of America’s Best Scientists.