The Ice Hunter

Lonnie Thompson has spent more time above 18,000 feet than any other person on Earth. Trekking to the Himalayas and Andes and beyond, he has risked blood clots and temporary blindness in the name of a single pursuit: preserving tens of thousands of years of weather history coded deep in the planet's fast-vanishing glaciers. "No scientist has taken bigger risks to track ancient weather patterns and help us understand the anomaly of current climate trends," says Al Gore.

Thompson stores his prehistoric glacial samples at Ohio State University in vaults kept at subarctic temperatures and studies the dust particles and air trapped within the ice. From this atmospheric evidence, he has reconstructed a meticulous calendar of temperatures dating back 750,000 years. The upshot: "It proves that the warming trends of today are vastly more dramatic than what we've seen over 5,000 years," says Thompson.

Growing up on a small farm in West Virginia, Thompson studied geology so he could work in the coal industry. But he got sidetracked in grad school, when he examined the first ice core ever extracted by American scientists. "You could have knocked me over with a feather the day I discovered, firsthand, that glaciers contain a frozen history of the Earth," he recalls. Now, in his work at the Byrd Polar Research Center at Ohio State, Thompson possesses a will to survive on par with Lance Armstrong's, defying frostbite and hurricane-force winds. Photographs he has taken provide disturbing views of the world's melting glaciers -- including the ice cap on Mount Kilimanjaro, which is expected to disappear entirely by 2015.

Thompson dismisses skeptics who contend that the current warming trend is due to a natural cycle. "Name one who has ever really studied climate or collected data," he says. "I bet you can't." Glaciers, he adds, "have no political agenda. They don't care if you're a Democrat or a Republican. Science is about what is, not what we believe or hope. And it shows that global warming is wiping out invaluable geological archives right before our eyes."

Next: The Hardballer: Dr. Ralph Cicerone

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