Andrei Petrovich Kapitsa
Andrei Petrovich Kapiza ( Russian Андре́й Петро́вич Капи́ца ; born July 9, 1931 in Cambridge , England ; † August 2, 2011 in Moscow ) was a Russian geographer and Antarctic explorer . He is considered the discoverer of Lake Vostok , the largest subglacial lake under the Antarctic ice sheet .
The existence of the lake was initially, at the end of the 1950s, only a thesis based on the results of seismic measurements in the vicinity of the Vostok station , which was only confirmed beyond doubt in 1996 by a Russian-British team. The discovery of Lake Vostok is considered one of the most remarkable geographical discoveries of the 20th century and one of the last great geographical discoveries on earth .
Life
Andrei Kapiza comes from a Russian family of scientists: his father was the Nobel Prize winner Pyotr Leonidowitsch Kapiza , his grandfather (the father of his mother Anna Alexejewna Krylova) was the naval engineer and mathematician Alexei Nikolayevich Krylov , his older brother Sergei was a physicist and long-time presenter of a science program on Russian television .
Like his brother Sergei, he was born in Cambridge, where his father was a university director at the time. After the father was refused to leave the USSR in 1934 , the family lived in Moscow.
In 1953 Andrei Kapiza graduated from the Faculty of Geography at Moscow's Lomonosov University . He then worked in the Faculty's Laboratory for Experimental Geomorphology.
In 1958 he defended his dissertation “Morphology of the Ice Sheet of Eastern Antarctica ” ( “Морфология ледникового покрова Восточной Антар” ) as a “candidate of the sciences” (кандидат наук ). In 1965, the doctoral thesis “ Subglacial Relief of the Antarctic” ( “Подлёдный рельеф Антарктиды” ) followed.
Between 1955 and 1964 he took part in four Soviet Antarctic expeditions.
Andrei Kapiza used the seismic measurements carried out in the vicinity of the Vostok station from 1959 and 1964 to determine the thickness of the ice sheet.
At the same time, the results led him to the assumption that there is a large subglacial lake at this point, which he named after the station Vostoksee. After further research could only support this thesis but not prove it, a Russian-British team succeeded in providing this unequivocal proof in 1996 by combining various measurement methods and data.
From 1967 to 1969 he led an East Africa expedition of the Russian Academy of Sciences .
Between 1965 and 1970 he was the dean of the Faculty of Geography at Moscow's Lomonosov University.
Andrei Kapiza was elected an associate member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1970.
In 1972 he initiated the establishment of the Soviet Pacific Institute for Geography in Vladivostok, of which he became the first director.
In 1977 he returned to Moscow and his old alma mater because of illness. There he took over the management of the Institute for Physical Geography and Paleogeography of the same faculty in 1978. After the reorganization in 1987, he founded the chair for the rational use of nature and became its head.
At the same time he was Deputy Minister of Science of the USSR from 1978 to 1990 and Chairman of the Scientific Council of the USSR.
In his further scientific work, Andrei Kapiza took on the topics of " greenhouse effect ", global warming and in particular the ozone hole over the Antarctic early on. In the last decade of his life, these led to the work "A methodology for assessing the state of Arctic ecosystems transformed by human activities" and, together with AA Gawrilow, he developed a theory on the natural origin of the anomalies of the Antarctic ozone hole. His hypotheses on human influence or, better still, non-influence on the world climate found no support from the majority of the scientific community.
Kapiza died in Moscow on August 2, 2011 at the age of 80 - less than six months before Russian researchers broke through the ice sheet to Lake Vostok on February 20, 2012 after drilling for twenty years.
honors and awards
- 1971 State Prize of the USSR for his contribution to the Atlas of Antarctica
- 1972 Honorable Worker in the University Sector
- 2002 Honored Scientist of the Russian Federation
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c Andrey Kapitsa dies in Moscow . In: Russian Geographical Society , August 3, 2011. Retrieved February 10, 2012.
- ↑ Appeal to the Duma on Lake Vostok, Antarctica (PDF; 147 kB) In: Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition . April 14, 2008. Retrieved February 10, 2012.
- ↑ Kapitsa AP, Robin GQ de, Ridley JK, Zotikov IA A Large Deep Freshwater Lake Between the Ice Sheet. Nature 1996; 381: 684-686.
- ^ Faculty of Geography, Lomonosov Moscow University . Retrieved August 3, 2011.
- ↑ APKapitsa u. AA Gavrilov, Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences, 1999, Vol. 366, № 4
- ↑ Russians drill giant seas under the eternal ice, Mirror online. February 7, 2012. Retrieved February 10, 2012.
- ↑ Указ Президента РФ № 1015 . Kremlin.ru. 21 сентября 2002. Archived from the original on April 26, 2013. Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Retrieved February 10, 2012.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Kapiza, Andrei Petrovich |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Капица, Андрей Петрович (Russian) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | Russian geographer and Antarctic explorer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | July 9, 1931 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Cambridge , UK |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 2, 2011 |
| Place of death | Moscow |