He was one of the first to establish the role of carbon dioxide (CO2) in global warming. French glaciologist Claude Lorius died on Tuesday March 23 at the age of 91.
A pioneer of polar expeditions, Claude Lorius has spent a total of six years in Antarctica since his first mission in 1957. He helped found climatology, reconstructing the climate of the past through the study of air bubbles trapped in ice cores over millennia.
"Claude was also of the caliber of polar exploration adventurers," praised explorer Jean-Louis Étienne, in a video posted on Twitter.
Born in Besançon on February 27, 1932, Claude Lorius, barely graduated, came across an ad: "Students wanted to participate in the International Geophysical Year", in Antarctica. He will remain for a year, in 1957, in extreme conditions, at the Charcot base, on this white continent where he will never stop wanting to return.
Became a researcher at the CNRS in 1961, he returned to Terre-Adélie in 1965. There, he decided to take an interest in air bubbles in the ice, as many atmospheric samples that could provide information on interactions with the climate. . As early as the 1970s, he began to suspect the role of human activities in global warming.
In 1977-1978, after three years of scouting and ten of preparation, he and his team began deep drilling of Dome C (south-east Antarctica). They dig up to 900 m, a feat allowing them to retrace 40,000 years of climatic history. In 1984, a mission to the Russian base in Vostok (1,500 km inside Antarctica) enabled him to ascend 150,000-year-old ice.
Being able to reconstruct a complete climate cycle, he observes that the temperature curves follow regular rhythms, before racing at the same time as those of CO2 since the middle of the 19th century and the Industrial Revolution. These results will be published in 1987 in the journal Nature.
The researcher, member of the Academy of Sciences, will then work to mobilize for the fight against global warming.
In 2002, he received the CNRS gold medal with his colleague and friend Jean Jouzel.
The Oscar-winning director Luc Jacquet dedicated a film to him, La Glace et le Ciel.
