Professor Steffen was a renowned scientist who did research at the world’s two largest ice sheets, Antarctica and Greenland. His 30-year study of Greenland proved to the world that the ice sheet melting is accelerating. Glaciers are both losing mass and sliding into the ocean faster. On August 8, 2020, Konrad Steffen fell into a crevasse that had opened next to the research station that he had founded in 1990. He was 68 and had gone out on a routine data collection walk.
Professor Konrad Steffen began his studies in the Arctic in the 1970s, founded Swiss Camp, the Lab and dining room for scientists and students in 1990 and worked there almost every year. He was also a professor of geography at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Swiss Camp was built above the Arctic Circle on the ice sheet that covers most of the island of Greenland. It sits atop a wooden platform on posts driven 12 meters into the ice. As the glacier below it began to shift, the entire camp moved with it, sliding up to several inches a day from its original GPS location. Swiss Camp also rose on its posts above the ice sheet as the glacier below melted down – as much as 12 feet in four years.
This program includes excerpts from a December 5, 2017 lecture he gave in Switzerland where he was born, and the audio from a brief film made about him in 2017.
There are obits in all major media that tell the story of an extraordinary life and of the tragedy of the destruction of the Greenland ice sheet.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:00 — 39.8MB)
