Willi Dansgaard

Willi Dansgaard was a Danish geophysicist, born in 1922 in Copenhagen and died in 2011, regarded as the founding figure of ice core paleoclimatology. Working from the Danish Meteorological Institute and later the University of Copenhagen, he was the first to show that the trace isotopes oxygen eighteen and deuterium preserved in accumulated glacier ice could be measured to reconstruct past temperature, and his access to United States Army ice core drilling at Camp Century in Greenland during the 1960s helped establish deep ice coring as a scientific tool. He led isotope analysis of the DYE-3 ice core in southern Greenland, completed in 1981, a project that became a cornerstone of the study of past climate.