Paul Crutzen

Paul Jozef Crutzen was a Dutch meteorologist and atmospheric chemist, born in 1933 in Amsterdam and died in 2021 in Mainz, Germany. In 1970 he showed how nitrous oxide emitted by human activity, including fertilizer use, could deplete stratospheric ozone, work that contributed to his sharing the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Mario Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland for research on ozone formation and decomposition. He was also among the first scientists to describe the concept of nuclear winter, and he later popularized the term Anthropocene for a proposed new geological epoch defined by drastic human effects on Earth.