Belgica Prize Awarded to Dominique Raynaud of the LGGE

In January 2005, the Belgica Prize was awarded to Dominique Raynaud, Director of the Laboratoire de Glaciologie et Géophysique de l'Environnement of Grenoble, in a ceremony held at the Royal academy of Arts and Sciences, in Brussels. Participating at the ceremony were Gaston de Gerlache (doyen of the Antarctic, and son of Adrien de Gerlache, Leader of the Belgica Expedition), and Alain Hubert of the IPF.

Prof. Raynaud was selected by the Academy to honour him for his work on Antarctic ice cores, which has allowed scientists to reconstruct past climate to almost a million years before our time.

This research has been instrumental in demonstrating that the past climate evolved between certain extremes of temperature, ranging from ice ages to interglacial periods according to cyclical planetary and other astronomical events.

This finding allowed the human influence on climate change in the industrial age to be put into its proper context.