Belgica 2023 medal for Jérôme Chappellaz

Congratulations to Professor Jérôme Chappellaz, who has been awarded the Belgica 2023 medal for polar exploration by the Royal Academy of Belgium. The jury underlines "his fundamental contribution to the reconstruction of the evolution of atmospheric methane concentration over the last 800,000 years based on the analysis of air bubbles embedded in ice cores from Antarctica and Greenland, and his entire career, which contributes significantly to an in-depth knowledge of polar environments."

At EPFL, Jérôme Chappellaz leads the Smart Environmental Sensing in Extreme Environments Laboratory (SENSE) and ALPOLE, the center of excellence for alpine and extreme environments at Sion, as part of EPFL Valais Wallis. He is also the president of the Ice Memory Foundation, which aims to collect, save and manage ice cores from selected glaciers currently in danger of degradation or disappearance, with their yielded information for decades and centuries to come.