Memories in the Ice

For the International Polar Year, the CNRS and the French Polar Institute, Paul-Emile Victor (IPEV) have joined forces to produce podcasts on polar research. A Memory preserved in Ice? by Claude Lorius, glaciologist at the CNRS -Module 2: Is Ice the Archive of Planet Earth?

A portrait of Claire Waelbroeck, a paleoclimatologist at the Laboratoire des sciences du climat et de l'environnement (LSCE) in Gif-sur-Yvette. This young researcher, of Belgian origin, winner of the CNRS Bronze Medal in 2003, describes her scientific work. She studies past climate variation through the analysis of marine sediment and polar ice. Her research aims at reconstructing natural climate variability in order to understand the current climate more fully.

For the International Polar Year, the CNRS and the French Polar Institute, Paul-Emile Victor (IPEV) have joined forces to produce podcasts on polar research. A Memory preserved in Ice? by Claude Lorius, glaciologist at the CNRS - Module 3: How can you read the past in ice?

In the Laboratory of Physical Geography in Meudon, Agnès Gauthier, a palynologist, reconstitutes the paleoenvironment and the paleoclimates which were active in our part of the world during a hundred of thousands years. She indentifies and counts pollen grains extracted from sediment cores, which were sampled from the Maar of Allerêt, a volcanic lake now dried up, located in the Massif Central.

An interview with Jean Jouzel, Director of the Institut Pierre Simon Laplace in Paris, who received the CNRS Gold Medal in 2002 jointly with Claude Lorius. Jean Jouzel develops mathematical models for calculating climate warming as a function of the nature and gas content of the atmosphere. Bubbles of air in ice cores collected in the Antarctic reveal the composition of the atmosphere in past centuries. Scientists thus obtain correlations between greenhouse gases and climate cycles. Jean Jouzel…

An interview with Claude Lorius, Emeritus Director of Research at CNRS, who received the CNRS Gold Medal in 2002. He received the award jointly with Jean Jouzel, for research which revealed the links between the quantity of greenhouse gases and climate change, resulting from the analysis of the air bubbles in the ice which has been accumulating for millennia at the South Pole. Claude Lorius recalls his career, beginning with his first visit to the Antarctic in 1957, at the time of the…

In May 1997 the Marion Dufresne, one of the largest oceanographic vessels in the world, carried out a major core sampling survey organized by the Institut Polaire. Its mission was to collect sediment from the ocean floor in a zone stretching from New Zealand to Antarctica.