A University of Manitoba climate scientist is being recognized with a prestigious prize for her interest in ice cores and related contributions to the world’s understanding of human-induced global warming.
Last week, Dorthe Dahl-Jensen won a 2023 Frontiers of Knowledge Award, an international honour that recognizes scientific breakthroughs and artworks that “(push) forward the frontiers of the known world.”
Dahl-Jensen, who spends half the year in Winnipeg and the remainder in Copenhagen where she holds another professorship, is among a group of five recipients in the climate research category.
The research team received a combined 400,000 euro ($587,944) for its members’ respective efforts in revealing that, over the past 800,000 years, carbon dioxide concentrations due to natural variability have never reached the amounts recorded in the 21st century.
Dahl-Jensen likened ice cores to “a goldmine of knowledge,” given they can be used to study historical temperatures and greenhouse gas levels by measuring water isotopes and air bubbles trapped within layers of packed snow inside them.
The Danish researcher, who joined the U of M in 2018, has used these tools to determine historic CO2 concentrations during warm periods on Earth — even when air temperatures were slightly higher than today — never surpassed 300 parts per million.
In 2023, her team discovered record-high CO2 concentrations of about 420 PPM.
“What Dahl-Jensen’s research has revealed is that greenhouse gas concentrations at no point reached the levels of today,” states a release from the BBVA Foundation, an affiliate of financial services company Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria that distributes the awards annually.
Per the foundation, which appoints judges made up of internationally reputed experts in their fields in consultation with the Spanish National Research Council, the honours were established to recognize the importance of basic knowledge and the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of it.
There is no cap on the number of researchers who can be recognized with a single award, unlike other esteemed honours such as the Nobel Prize, which many Frontiers recipients have also achieved.
Dahl-Jensen is in the company of French scientists Jean Jouzel and Valérie Masson-Delmotte and Swiss researchers Jakob Schwander and Thomas Stocker.
All of the recipients have played a role in analyzing records extracted from the planet’s oldest and thickest ice deposits in Antarctica and Greenland.
Combined, their research on polar ice samples has established a clear link between the rise of greenhouse gas emissions, including CO2 and methane, and systemic changes in ambient air temperatures across the globe.
Dahl-Jensen has been studying ice sheets for decades, dating to her first expedition in 1981.
Then an avid mountaineer, she said she was intrigued by the adventure of field work. Today, the academic is also motivated by what she sees as a moral obligation.
“Our generation has a responsibility to the young people (to) leave a world that’s not going to warm out of control,” said Dahl-Jensen, who was head-hunted to be the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Arctic Ice, Freshwater Marine Coupling and Climate Change.
While noting there has been minimal progress to reduce global emissions during her career and Canada is among those experiencing the serious impacts in the form of forest fires and floods, Dahl-Jensen said she remains optimistic.
Dahl-Jensen said she hopes the award will bring attention to her research team’s findings and spark interest among young people to pursue careers in the green energy sector.
“We need the best, bright minds to work on development of green energy and technology that will bring us into a future where we can live comfortable without fossil fuels. We need to inspire people and engage them — I think that’s more important than being pessimistic and trying to doom the world.”
