Valérie Masson-Delmotte and Jean Jouzel receive the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award
On 10 January 2024, the 16th edition of the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Climate Change category was attributed to five European scientists, including Valérie Masson-Delmotte and Jean Jouzel.
Valérie Masson-Delmotte, a research director at the Laboratory for Sciences of Climate and Environment (LSCE – Univ. Paris-Saclay/CEA/CNRS/UVSQ), and Jean Jouzel, an Emeritus CNRS research director at the same laboratory, have been awarded the prestigious BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award, alongside Dorthe Dahl-Jensen, a professor at the University of Copenhagen, and Jakob Schwander and Thomas Stocker, both researchers at the University of Bern. Their pioneering research on polar ice samples has established a “fundamental coupling” between greenhouse gas concentrations and rising air temperatures across the planet over the past 800,000 years.
Their work has played a part in improving our understanding of the mechanisms at work in global warming. They have demonstrated that records extracted from Earth’s oldest and thickest ice deposits, in Antarctica and Greenland, “show that changes in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide and methane, are accompanied by systematic changes in ambient air temperature across the globe.”
The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Awards recognise and reward researchers whose work has had a singular impact in their field, privileging those that significantly enlarge the stock of knowledge in a discipline, open up new fields, or build bridges between disciplinary areas. The goal of the awards, established in 2008, is to celebrate and promote the value of knowledge as a public good without frontiers, the best instrument to take on the great global challenges of our time and expand the worldviews of each individual.
Find out more about Valérie Masson-Delmotte in her researcher portrait: https://www.universite-paris-saclay.fr/en/news/valerie-masson-delmotte-…