SoMAS Professor Marvin Geller became the fourth Stony Brook faculty member sharing the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore for his participation in the lnter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Professor Geller received the congratulatory letter from the United Nations Environment Programme on January 22, 2008 for his contribution in the assessment of stratospheric ozone depletion and climate change that lead to the Montreal Protocol. This news came after three other SoMAS professors, Robert Cess, Edmund Chang and Minghua Zhang, were recognized for their share of the IPCC Nobel Prize earlier this year.
The Montreal Protocol, for which Professor Geller was recognized, led to strict controls and a phase out of chemical emissions that destroy stratospheric ozone. The bases for these actions were a series of scientific assessments that established an international scientific consensus of knowledge on stratospheric ozone. The latest assessment predicts that, as a result of the actions of the Montreal Protocol and its amendments, the Antarctic ozone hole will be healed during the period 2060-2075. Professor Geller participated in each international ozone assessment since they began in 1981.
“Stony Brook faculty has played a very prominent role in the progress of stratospheric ozone research. Its contribution is widely recognized in the scientific community,” said Professor Minghua Zhang, Director of the Institute for Terrestrial and Planetary Atmospheres.
In addition to Professor Geller’s role in the Montreal Protocol, Professors Robert de Zafra and Philip Solomon of the Physics Department were part of the first ozone expedition to the Antarctic in 1986. Their group made the first measurements establishing that chlorine released from man-made chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) is the active agent responsible for causing the Antarctic “Ozone Hole”.
Research relating to stratospheric ozone depletion has earned two other Nobel Prizes. One is the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to Paul Crutzen, Mario Molina and F. Sherwood Rowland for the science of ozone formation and decomposition that warned CFCs destroy the-ozone-layer. The other is the 2007 Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded to Gerhard Ertl for his studies of chemical processes on solid surfaces.
