Willi Dansgaard (30 August 1922 – 8 January 2011) was a Danish paleoclimatologist. He was Professor Emeritus of Geophysics at the University of Copenhagen and a member of the Royal Danish Academy of Science and Letters, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Icelandic Academy of Sciences, and the Danish Geophysical Society.

Early life and career

Dansgaard grew up in Copenhagen, to parents who owned an engraving shop. In 1947, he graduated from the University of Copenhagen, winning a gold medal for his thesis on X-ray dosimetry.

After several years of research, including some at sites in Greenland, Dansgaard returned to the University of Copenhagen's Biophysics Laboratory, where he developed its mass spectrometer to analyse water isotopes. According to his student Jørgen Peder Steffensen:

He was the first scientist to extract palaeoclimatic information from the American Camp Century ice core from Greenland drilled by the US army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL). Dansgaard also took a leading role in the drilling of the first ice core to bedrock for scientific reasons, the DYE-3 core from South Greenland, from the Camp Century. Confirming findings from the analysis of the Camp Century ice core, the DYE-3 climate profile documented the existence of rapid climate change, during and at the end of the last glacial. The repeated events of abrupt climate change during the glacial are named after Willi Dansgaard and his Swiss colleague, Hans Oeschger, and are known as Dansgaard–Oeschger events.

Awards

  • 1971 Hans Egede Medal
  • 1975 Swedish Society for Anthropology and Geography's Vega medal
  • 1976 Seligman Crystal from the International Glaciological Society
  • 1995 Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Crafoord Prize
  • 1996 Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, 1996

Notes

  • - photo of Dansgaard, Chester C. Langway and Hans Oeschger
  • - Dansgaard's 2005 autobiography "Frozen Annals, Greenland Ice Sheet Research"
  • "Carbon Dioxide Through the Ice Ages' from UCSD (archived 2004)
  • "History of Danish ice core research" from Niels Bohr Institute (archived 2009)