FXIV-5-CC-Thompson-Web

Lonnie G. Thompson

FRONTIERS OF KNOWLEDGE AWARD

Climate Change

14th Edition

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.

CITATION (EXCERPT)

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Climate Change category goes, in this fourteenth edition, to Ellen Mosley-Thompson and Lonnie G. 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.

The data they painstakingly obtained through an impressive set of 78 expeditions to high-altitude regions in the Andes, the Himalayas and Kilimanjaro have enriched the interpretation of climate change from global ice-core records, and documented tropical climatic variability and its impacts on ecosystems and societies.

The ice cores obtained by the Thompsons and their local collaborators over the last half century have been drawn from sites likely never to be visited again, and as such have become part of our natural and cultural heritage. Their research bears witness to the rapid loss of high mountain glaciers and its consequences.