January 2009 Issue Ohioan - Lonnie Thompson AGE: Turned 60 last
July at 20,000 feet in the Andes Mountains of South America.
PERSONAL: He and his wife and colleague, Ellen, have one
daughter, Regina. OCCUPATION: Paleoclimatologist at The Ohio
State University’s Byrd Polar Research Center and professor of
environmental geology and paleoclimatology at OSU. TRANSLATION:
Thompson studies the history of Earth’s climate as it is
recorded in ice. His work takes him to some of the highest
mountaintops in the tropics to drill ice cores (such as the one
pictured above), which are brought to OSU’s Byrd Center, the
only tropical archive on Earth. FIELD WORK: “I’ve been on 54
expeditions, in 15 different countries,” Thompson says. “The
longest lasted three months.” Six tons of equipment goes to the
drill site, and about 10 tons of ice cores comes back.
DISCOVERIES: Thompson and his team were the first to
successfully dig up ice cores in the tropics. His work has
served as a learning tool in “An Inconvenient Truth” (Al Gor