French glaciologist Claude Lorius, one of the first to have established the role of carbon dioxide (CO2) in global warming, died Tuesday at the age of 91, AFP learned Thursday, March 23 from his publisher and a CNRS researcher of his entourage.

This pioneer of polar expeditions, who has lived a cumulative six years in Antarctica since his first mission in 1957, helped found climatology, reconstructing the climate of the past through the study of air bubbles trapped in ice cores over millennia.

"Les éditions Arthaud regret to announce the death of their author Claude Lorius", who had recounted his life as a glaciologist in his "Mémoires sauvées des glaces".

"Claude Lorius died Tuesday morning" in Burgundy, confirmed to AFP the paleoclimatologist of the CNRS Jerome Chappellaz, researcher and former collaborator of Claude Lorius, who is close to the family. "Claude was also of the caliber of the adventurers of polar exploration," said explorer Jean-Louis Étienne, in a video published on Twitter.

Missions to Antarctica

Born in Besançon on February 27, 1932, Claude Lorius, barely graduated, had come across an advertisement: "Looking for students to participate in the International Geophysical Year", in Antarctica. He stayed a year, in 1957, in extreme conditions, at the Charcot base, on this white continent where he never ceased to want to return.

He became a researcher at the CNRS in 1961 and returned to Adélie land in 1965. There, he decided to focus on ice air bubbles, samples of the atmosphere that could provide information on interactions with 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 years of preparation, he and his team began drilling deep into Dome C (southeast Antarctica). They dig up to 900 meters, a feat that can trace 40,000 years of climate history.

In 1984 a mission to the Russian base of Vostok (1,500 km inside Antarctica) allowed him to go up ice 150,000 years.

Able to reconstruct a complete climate cycle, he notes that temperature curves follow regular rhythms, before racing at the same time as those of CO2 since the mid-nineteenth century and the Industrial Revolution. These results will be published in 1987 in the journal Nature.

The researcher, a member of the French 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. Oscar-winning director Luc Jacquet dedicated a film to him in 2015, "La Glace et le ciel".

With AFP

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