Cesare Emiliani

Cesare Emiliani was an Italian American geologist and micropaleontologist, born in 1922 and died in 1995, regarded as the founder of paleoceanography. At the University of Chicago he applied oxygen isotope analysis to the shells of foraminifera recovered from long deep sea sediment cores, developing a timescale of marine isotope stages still used today and establishing that ice ages over roughly the last half million years occur in cycles, work that gave strong support to the Milankovitch hypothesis of orbitally driven climate change. He was awarded the Alexander Agassiz Medal of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1989.