Eric Wolff
Climate Change and Earth-Ocean-Atmosphere Systems
 La Chandra Bioscience Private Limited
Greece
Biography
Eric Wolff is a Royal Society Research Professor in the Department of Earth Sciences at Cambridge University. After graduating as a chemist, he has studied ice cores from the Antarctic and Greenland for the past 30 years, using them to understand changing climate, as well as changing levels of pollution in remote areas. He also carries out research into the chemistry of the lower parts of the Antarctic atmosphere. Until June 2013, he led a programme at the British Antarctic Survey. He chaired the science committee of the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica (EPICA), which produced 800,000 year records of climate from the Dome C (Antarctica) ice core and co-chairs the international initiative (IPICS) to coordinate future ice core research. His main research goal is to understand the causes of climate evolution over recent glacial cycles. He was elected as FRS in 2010. He chairs the Royal Society's Global Environmental Research Committee, and led the Royal Society team in a joint initiative with the National Academy of Sciences on explaining climate science “Climate change: evidence and causes” in 2013.
Research Interest
I study past climate and environment, mainly from polar (Antarctic and Greenland) ice cores. Ice in the polar regions preserves a unique chronological archive of information about the past. This extends so far 800,000 years in Antarctica and 128,000 years in Greenland. In collaboration with the British Antarctic Survey (also in Cambridge) and colleagues overseas, I collect ice cores, analyse them, and draw conclusions about the mechanisms of climate change. The ice builds up year by year and stores information in three main ways: the isotopic content of the water molecules themselves tell us about past temperature; soluble and insoluble impurities trapped on the snow surface and in snowflakes record information about aspects such as past volcanic eruptions, sea ice extent, and biomass burning; finally air bubbles trapped in the ice record atmospheric composition including past greenhouse gas concentrations.
