Konrad Steffen, a planet-renowned local weather scientist, died at the age of 68 on Saturday (Aug. 8) in an incident in Greenland.
Steffen, the Director of the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, investigated climate adjust for more than 40 years, focusing on its impacts on the Arctic and Antarctic, in accordance to a assertion. His decades-extended investigation in Greenland, specially, confirmed that climate transform is leading to Greenland’s ice sheet to melt with growing pace, in accordance to The New York Occasions.
He died around a investigation station known as “Swiss Camp” that he experienced started in Greenland 30 decades in the past. Steffen experienced fallen into an ice crevasse and drowned in the deep drinking water inside of it, in accordance to the Occasions. Scientists at the station explained to the Instances that these crevasses ended up recognized dangers but high winds and recent snowfall created them really hard to see.
Linked: Pics: craters hidden beneath the Greenland ice sheet
Ryan R. Neely III, a climate scientist at the University of Leeds in England, who researched beneath Steffen, explained to the Times that crevasses employed to be unheard of in that space, but warming experienced caused stresses on the ice sheet and subsequent cracks. “In the end,” he reported, “it looks like climate change actually claimed him as a victim.”
Steffen manufactured a main effect on the field of local climate science, and typically introduced his study on local weather alter to political leaders and the public, in accordance to The Washington Submit.
He returned to the camp, consisting of a lab hut and a different hut for communal eating, every spring, in accordance to the Put up. From time to time the camp would collapse, and be rebuilt. Steffen would frequently build most of it himself, in accordance to the Submit. Whilst there, he would only sleep three to 4 several hours a night and typically worked with bare fingers in the frigid chilly, in accordance to the Submit.
Steffen was born in 1952 and earned his doctorate from ETH Zurich in Switzerland in 1984. In 1990, he became a professor of climatology at the University of Colorado in Boulder and served as the director of the university’s Cooperative Institute for Analysis in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) from 2005 to 2012, before leaving to direct the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research. As of 2012, he was also a professor at ETH Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technologies Lausanne, in accordance to the assertion.
“I just take some small comfort and ease being aware of he was wherever he wished to be, carrying out what he preferred to be carrying out,” the current CIRES director Waleed Abdalati, who earned his PhD below Steffen’s mentorship, reported in a statement from CIRES.
Steffen “constantly had a smile and a sort term to say,” according to the statement. “And it appeared, at moments, like he could do something: short Congress, ford a meltwater river on a snowmachine, mesmerize journalists with tales of his time on the ice.”
At first released on Live Science.
