Awarded the 14th BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Climate Change, Lonnie Thompson recounts in this interview how the study of tropical glaciers has allowed scientists to reconstruct climate variations spanning thousands of years. He explains how ice cores extracted from the summits of South America, Tibet, and Africa preserve unique signals of past atmospheric behavior, revealing patterns of droughts, temperatures, and ocean circulation. His testimony underscores the accelerated loss of glaciers across the globe and the urgent need to understand these records before they disappear forever.
The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Climate Change category has gone in this fourteenth edition to the U.S. glaciologists Ellen Mosley-Thompson and Lonnie Thompson, “for advancing the knowledge and understanding of past and current climate change through persistent, dedi
Awarded the 14th BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Climate Change, Lonnie Thompson recounts in this interview how the study of tropical glaciers has allowed scientists to reconstruct climate variations spanning thousands of years. He explains how ice cores extracted from the summits of South America, Tibet, and Africa preserve unique signals of past atmospheric behavior, revealing patterns of droughts, temperatures, and ocean circulation. His testimony underscores the accelerated loss of glaciers across the globe and the urgent need to understand these records before they disappear forever.
The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Climate Change category has gone in this fourteenth edition to the U.S. glaciologists Ellen Mosley-Thompson and Lonnie Thompson, “for advancing the knowledge and understanding of past and current climate change through persistent, dedicated ice‐core research in the vanishing high mountain glaciers of the tropics and mid latitudes,” said the committee in its citation.
00:00 Introduction
00:05 Why is the ice core research in which you and Ellen Mosley-Thompson have been pioneers so scientifically valuable, and how has it contributed to understanding both past and present climate change?
01:30 What have been the most important discoveries achieved during your expeditions to analyze ice cores in high-altitude regions such as the Andes, the Himalayas, and Mount Kilimanjaro?
02:40 What has your work revealed about the impacts of past climate change on earlier human societies, and what lessons can be learned from these historical events to better understand and address the current challenge of anthropogenic global warming?
04:23 How severe is the current retreat of glaciers that you have documented in your research, and what are its consequences at both regional and global scales?
06:35 There is clearly a significant gap between scientific discoveries about the severity of climate change and the inadequacy of political measures to address it. What is your view on this problem, and what can be done to bridge the gap between climate science and political inaction?
