EGU Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky Medal 2006

The French scientist Claude Lorius has won the prestigious EGU Vladimir Ivanvich Vernadsky Medal for his outstanding achievements in advancing knowledge of past climates and atmospheric composition by the study of Antarctic ice cores and the bubbles of air entrapped in them.

This medal has been established by the Division on Biogeosciences in recognition of the scientific achievement of Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky. It is reserved for scientists for their exceptional contributions to biogeosciences in general.

Claude Lorius was a founding director of the Laboratoire de glaciologie geophysique de l'environnement in Grenoble from 1983 to 1988, and subsequently Director Emeritus of research at CNRS. He is a recipient of many prizes and honours, among them the Tyler Prize for the environment (1996), the Balzan Prize for climatology (2001), The CNRS Medaille d'Or (2002: jointly with Jean Jouzel). He is a foreign member of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 1994.

Resumé

Claude Lorius was born in 1932 and obtained his doctorate in 1962. He has taken part in more than 20 expeditions to the polar regions, primarily to Antarctica. He is distinguished by his ability to organise internationally co-operating teams, for example in the drilling of the Vostok core in which Russian, French and American scientists worked together in interdisciplinary teams to recover ice cores. We owe to Claude Lorius the insight that the air trapped in old ice cores might contain a record of the composition of the atmosphere in the past. Subsequently, the international and interdisciplinary work that he inspired has led to the realization that over periods of hundreds of thousands of years, the climate and the biogeochemical cycles of the planet are synchronized together as two parts of a single "Earth system". The discovery by Lorius and his associates of the systematic changes in atmospheric composition that accompanied the Quaternary glacial cycles ranks as one of the outstanding achievements in global biogeochemistry during the 20th century".

Medal Lecture

Professor Lorius will accept his medal and give his Medal lecture during the EGU General Assembly, to be held in Vienna, Austria from 2 – 7 April 2006.

More information:
http://www.copernicus.org/EGU/awards/medallists/_2006/vladimir_ivanovich_vernadsky.html