Wallace Smith Broecker Biography

Wallace Smith Broecker (born November 29, 1931 in Chicago) is the Newberry Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia University, a scientist at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and a sustainability fellow at Arizona State University. He developed the idea of a global "conveyor belt" linking the circulation of the global ocean and made major contributions to the science of the carbon cycle and the use of chemical tracers and isotope dating in oceanography. Broecker has received the Crafoord Prize and the Vetlesen Prize.