Climatology: The Iceman

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As a result, he is now famous not only as a first-rate scientist but as a world-class adventurer--iron willed, intrepid and innovative. He and his colleagues have hauled tons of equipment across yawning crevasses and braved hurricane-force winds capable of sending tents skittering to the edge of precipices. And they have lived and worked at altitudes in excess of 20,000 ft. for four to six weeks at a time.

The danger involved was underscored in 1998 when a graduate student named Shawn Wight, 26, died of complications following a severe case of altitude sickness suffered while accompanying Thompson to the flanks of a 26,000-ft.-tall Himalayan peak. Wight's parents charged negligence and sued Ohio State for $21 million in damages. Although the judge dismissed the case and exonerated Thompson, the experience cast a pall over his high-altitude odysseys. "I don't understand," he says, "why anyone would want to climb a mountain for fun."

Fun was definitely not what Thompson had in mind when he won a scholarship to West Virginia's Marshall University, majored in geology, then enrolled at Ohio State with the intention of becoming a coal geologist. But while working on his master's degree, he took a research job that put him in contact with the first ice core ever retrieved from Antarctica. To his surprise, he became entranced with the idea of reconstructing Earth's climate history from the dust particles, pollen grains and subtle geochemical shifts trapped in the core's layers.

In recent years, Thompson has been consumed not only by the dramatic climatological shifts that occurred in the distant past but also by those that are so clearly taking place now. Earlier this year, for instance, Thompson unveiled compelling evidence that ice across the tropics is disappearing at an unprecedented rate. Kilimanjaro, he reported, sports 80% less ice cover today than it did in 1912; a third of that loss has happened within the past decade. The Quelccaya ice cap is also receding at an alarming clip and may disappear entirely by 2020.

At 53, Thompson is at the top of his game. He is, in fact, at a point in his career where he could throttle back and not work quite so hard. Instead he seems determined to speed up, to mount still more expeditions to the world's glaciers and ice caps before rising concentrations of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases force temperatures even higher. Later this year, he and his colleagues will report the results of the first climate record ever extracted from Kilimanjaro's ice--and very likely the last. "The world is warming," Thompson likes to remind people, "and it is foolish to pretend that it's not."