Claude Lorius, Director of Research Emeritus at CNRS, was one of the pioneers of polar ice research, leading expeditions to Antarctica for four decades. His first expedition in 1957, at the age of 23, to the Charcot Station during the International Geophysical Year, will remain forever engraved in his memory. He stayed there for a year, and he never stopped coming back to this ice continent so prized by explorers and scientists.

His scientific research began in earnest during his thesis work in Saclay in 1963, and he was one of the first to propose a method, based on the isotopes of water (snow), to reconstruct the temperature of the snow at the time of its fall. This new tool would later allow to establish links with the Earth's climate. A second winter stay, this time in Dumont d'Urville in 1965, allowed him to understand that the ice extracted from Antarctica contained air bubbles trapping information on the composition of the past atmosphere.

In the 1960s, he was the first to analyze the gas inclusions contained in polar ice cores to trace the past atmosphere. Twenty years later, he and his team at the Laboratoire de glaciologie et géophysique de l'environnement in Grenoble established the link between greenhouse gas content and climate change. This discovery, made from samples taken at the Vostok base (Antarctica), revealed 150,000 years, then 420,000 years of climate, and was featured on the cover of Nature magazine (1987). The following year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created.

Passionate and adventurous, he criss-crossed Antarctica, forging decisive partnerships with the Russians, particularly in Vostok, and was the initiator of the first major drilling in Dome C. His career as a researcher at CNRS took him and his team from Saclay to Grenoble in 1970, where he joined the Alpine Glaciology Laboratory, created by Louis Lliboutry, on the university campus. He taught Geophysics (Glaciology option) at Université de Grenoble and carried out his research at the Laboratoire de glaciologie et géophysique de l'environnement, now the Institut des géosciences de l'environnement (IGE - CNRS / UGA / Grenoble INP - UGA / Inrae / IRD), which he directed from 1983 to 1988.

President of the French Polar Expeditions, the French National Committee for Antarctic Research and the French Institute for Polar Research and Technology, which he founded in 1992, he has received numerous awards, including: the CNRS Gold Medal, obtained with his colleague and friend Jean Jouzel in 2002, the Blue Planet Prize and the Bower Science Award. In 2015, the documentary "La Glace et le Ciel" retraced for the general public the life of this great committed scientist.

With the death of Claude Lorius in 2023, the planet has lost one of its greatest discoverers and defenders, a man who devoted his life to understanding the climate. Let us hope that his legacy will live on through future generations and his scientific heirs in Grenoble and around the world to preserve and understand the memory of the climate contained in the ice.

Claude Lorius was also the sponsor of the ice core sanctuary project carried out today by the Ice Memory Foundation, of which the UGA is a founding partner. Lastly, Claude Lorius was a great humanist who wished for the preservation of the planet "that humans succeed in building a fairer world".