On 20 June 2024, the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei awarded Carlo Barbante, Professor of Analytical Chemistry at Ca’ Foscari University and former Director of the Institute of Polar Sciences at the CNR, member and Vice-President of the Accademia Nazionale delle Scienze detta dei XL, the Minister of Culture Prize for Geosciences.
The Prize, presented by Nobel Prize winner for Physics, Giorgio Parisi, was awarded to Carlo Barbante with the following motivation:
He is considered an international leader in polar sciences, both for his extensive experience in directing complex projects and for the scientific innovation he has brought to the study of Holocene climate and biogenetic cycles. His most interesting results, contained in his work in the field of Geosciences since 2014, concern the reconstruction of the last 800,000 years of climate variations, based on methodologies he has previously perfected for measurements of elements at very low concentrations and in traces (by means of mass spectroscopy), both in the environment and in biological samples, as well as the reconstruction of climate changes using ice cores sampled in Alpine glaciers and in the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. He has contributed highly innovative methodological developments to this research, which are now used by the entire international community and have significantly increased our ability to read and interpret environmental science archives, and thus to better understand the Earth system.