Lonnie Thompson is one of the world’s foremost authorities on paleoclimatology and glaciology. He has led 60 expeditions during the last 40 years, conducting ice-core drilling programs in the Polar Regions as well as on tropical and subtropical ice fields in 16 countries including China, Peru, Russia, Tanzania, and Papua, Indonesia (New Guinea). Thompson and his team were the first to developed lightweight solar-powered drilling equipment for the acquisition of histories from ice fields in the high Andes of Peru and on Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. The results from these ice-core-derived climate histories, published in more than 230 articles, have contributed greatly toward improved understanding of Earth’s climate system, both past and present. Thompson is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and in 2007 was awarded the National Medal of Science. In 2013 he was awarded the International Science and Technology Cooperation Award of the People’s Republic of China by the President of China, the highest honor given to a foreign scientist.