Jérôme Chappellaz

Jérôme Chappellaz (born 22 December 1964) is a French glaciologist, geochemist and paleoclimatologist who is director of the French Polar Institute. A senior researcher at France's National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), he is a co-founder and chairman of the Ice Memory Foundation.

Youth and education Coming from a family of Savoyard craftsmen, Jérôme Chappellaz became interested in volcanology from a very young age, after reading the works of Haroun Tazieff. At university, he studied geology, geophysics and geochemistry.

Chappellaz earned his Diploma of Advanced Studies (DEA) and wrote his doctoral thesis at Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, within the Laboratory of Glaciology and Environmental Geophysics, which was directed by the glaciologist Claude Lorius. At the time Chappellaz started his doctorate work, in 1987, Lorius was carrying out early analyses of carbon dioxide trapped in Antarctic ice.

As suggested by his thesis advisor Dominique Raynaud, Chappellaz began work on methane , which is also a greenhouse gas. CNRS recruited him as a research fellow in 1990, at the age of 25 years.

In 2018, he became director of the French Polar Institute (Institut polaire français Paul-Émile Victor, IPEV). According to Wired UK, "the Ice Memory project plans to create a library of hundreds of cores in an ice cave at Antarctica's Concordia Research Station, where mean annual temperatures hover around -54°C." Chappellaz continued in a leadership role through at least 2020; National Geographic in 2017 described him as the project's "coordinator".

The first samples to be preserved were three cores from a glacier in the French Alps, near the Mont Blanc summit.

Building the Antarctic vault has been delayed by the COVID pandemic, but Chappellaz expressed confidence that the project, which is endorsed by UNESCO, will proceed. As of 2021, Ice Memory was storing glacier samples from Europe, Bolivia, and Russia in Europe, while waiting for Antarctic storage to become available.

Chappellaz says that teams will collect ice from other sites, including Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and Mera Peak in Nepal.

Awards 1993 CNRS Bronze Medal 2001 Prix Jaffé of the French Academy of Sciences 2010 Paul W. Gast lecturer (on "Greenhouse gases and their isotopes in firn air and ice cores"), awarded by the European Association of Geochemistry and the Geochemical Society 2013 Science Innovation Award and the Nicholas Shackleton Medal, from the European Association of Geochemistry 2015 CNRS Silver Medal 2020 Chevalier in French Legion of Honour 2022 French Ministry of Overseas Medal of Honor for overseas commitment 2023 Belgian Royal Academy of Sciences, Letters and Fine Arts Belgica Medal