COPENHAGEN, Denmark, Feb. 7 (UPI) -- Willi Dansgaard, who first recognized a record of ancient climate was preserved in the Greenland icecap, has died, the University of Copenhagen said.
The Niels Bohr Institute at the university announced the Danish paleoclimatologist died in Copenhagen Jan. 8, the Los Angeles Times reported Monday. He was 88.
Dansgaard established the study of ice cores taken from the icecap as a cornerstone in the study of climate history and revolutionized scientific knowledge of the temperature and composition of the atmosphere stretching back over the last 150,000 years.
Because summer melting and winter refreezing formed successive layers of ice over the millennia, the Greenland ice sheet contained distinctive layers going back thousands of years.
Dansgaard demonstrated that past climate history could be deduced by analyzing different oxygen isotopes in the layers found in ice core samples.
In 1979 he was part of a Danish-American team that carried out the first scientifically motivated deep ice core drilling project in South Greenland and later organized or participated in expeditions to Norway, Greenland and Antarctica.
Dansgaard was born in Copenhagen Aug. 30, 1922, and received his education at the University of Copenhagen, where he earned a doctorate in physics and spent his entire career.
