Konrad Steffen, a world-renowned climate scientist, died at the age of 68 on Saturday (August 8) in an accident in Greenland.
Steffen, director of the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research, has been researching climate change for more than 40 years, focusing on its impact on the Arctic and Antarctic, according to a statement. His decades-long research in Greenland specifically confirmed that climate change is melting Greenland’s ice sheet with increasing speed, according to The New York Times.
He died near a research station known as “Swiss Camp” which he had set up in Greenland 30 years ago. Steffen had fallen into an iceberg and drowned in the deep water inside, according to the Times. Investigators at the station told the Times that these cripples were known dangers, but high winds and recent snowfall made them difficult to see.
Related: Photos: craters hidden under the Greenland ice sheet
Ryan R. Neely III, a climate scientist at the University of Leeds in England who studied under Steffen, told the Times that crevasses were once uncommon in that area, but warming had caused tension on the ice sheet and subsequent bursts. ‘Ultimately,’ he said, ‘it seems that climate change is actually claiming itself as a victim.’
Steffen made a major impact in the field of climate science, and often brought his research on climate change to political leaders and the public, according to The Washington Post.
He returned to the camp, consisting of a lab hut and another hut for communal food, each spring, according to the Post. Sometimes the camp would collapse, and be rebuilt. Steffen would probably build most of it himself, according to the Post. While there, he would only sleep three to four hours a night and often worked with bare hands in the fresh cold, according to the Post.
Steffen was born in 1952 and received his doctorate from the ETH Zurich in Switzerland in 1984. In 1990 he became Professor of Climatology at the University of Colorado at Boulder and served as Director of the University of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES)) from 2005 to 2012, before leaving to direct the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research. From 2012 he was also professor at ETH Zurich and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne, according to the statement.
“I take some comfort knowing that he was where he wanted to be, doing what he wanted to do,” said current CIRES director Waleed Abdalati, who earned his PhD under Steffen’s guidance, in a CIRES statement.
Steffen “always had a smile and a kind word to say,” according to the statement. “And it seemed like sometimes, like he could do anything: short Congress, destroy a river of meltwater on a snow machine, enchant journalists with stories of his time on the ice.”
Originally published on Live Science.
