University of Colorado at Boulder Emeritus Professor Mark Meier, one of the world's leading glaciologists, has been named the winner of the Goldthwait Polar Medal in recognition of his outstanding contributions to polar research.
The Goldthwait Polar Medal, which will be presented to Meier at a ceremony in Columbus, Ohio, on Oct. 4, is the Byrd Polar Research Center's most prestigious award.
Meier, former director of CU-Boulder's Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research and emeritus professor in the geological sciences department, has received a number of prestigious awards during his career. They include the Horton Medal from the American Geophysical Union, the Seligman Crystal Award from the International Glaciological Society, the international prize in hydrology of the International Association of Hydrological Sciences/the World Meteorological Organization/UNESCO, the Distinguished Service Award of the U.S. Department of the Interior and three medals from the USSR Academy of Sciences.
Earning his doctorate from the California Institute of Technology in 1957, Meier has conducted a variety of glacier dynamics investigations of both glaciers and snowcover in North America, Europe, Greenland and Antarctica through the U.S. Geological Survey and CU-Boulder.
Meier was one of the first scientists to apply remote sensing techniques to snow and ice, to pioneer the study of glacial surges and iceberg-calving tidewater glaciers and to spearhead a new "scaling" technique to estimate the rapid loss of glacier mass worldwide over the past century.