The climate science community is mourning the loss of a pioneering climate scientist and glaciologist, Konrad Steffen. Koni, as he was known to his friends and colleagues, apparently fell to his death in a deep opening in the ice called a crevasse on Saturday while doing research in Western Greenland.
Konrad “Koni” Steffen, a leading climate scientist who documented melting ice sheets, at the Swiss Camp research site in Greenland in 2007. REUTERS
With nearly 15,000 academic citations to his name, Steffen, who was 68 years old, dedicated his life to studying the rapidly melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. Ironically, it was the perils created by melting around Swiss Camp in Greenland — a research outpost he founded in 1990 — that claimed his life.
Jason Box, a well-known ice climatologist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, had spent many years working alongside Steffen and was with him right before he disappeared.
Box says the snowy, windy weather at the time was disorienting. He says Steffen “ultimately went beyond the safety perimeter in low visibility, windy conditions. Koni fell into a water based crevasse while the rest of us were working nearby, unaware. The last thing he said to us was he was going to look at data.”
The team organized a lengthy search and eventually found evidence in the thin ice. “[We] found a 2.5 meter long busted through hole in the 3 cm thick floor of the crevasse 8 meters down,” Box wrote in a message thread on Twitter. “I am told one is not buoyant in such cold freshwater. Since he was not found, I think he remains 8 meters down in the water.”
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