The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Climate Change goes to Jean Jouzel along with Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, Valérie Masson-Delmotte, Jakob Schwander and Thomas Stocker "for contributions to the polar ice core records that establish a fundamental coupling between greenhouse gases and air temperature characterizing climate change over the past 800,000 years".
An ice core is a cylindrical sample obtained by drilling into the substrate at different depths. Jean Jouzel’s analysis of one such core from the Antarctic base of Vostok, written up in a Nature paper of 1987, brought definitive proof that increased atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide lead to an increase in temperature. Although physics-based climate models showing this effect had existed since the 1960s, ice cores brought a whole new dimension to climate science by providing concrete data on the composition of the atmosphere throughout geological history. Work with these cores had begun in the 1980s, but none of the records obtained stretched further back than the last ice age. However, Soviet scientists stationed at Vostok were able to extract a longer core giving a temperature record of 160,000 years; the first time samples could be obtained from the previous interglacial period. With this material, Jouzel was able to demonstrate a close linkage between variations in the carbon cycle, atmospheric composition and climate, three key factors in the dynamics of glacial-interglacial cycles.
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