Lonnie Thompson

On May 1, 2012, he underwent a successful heart transplant.

In the 1970s, he was the first scientist "to retrieve ice samples from a remote tropical ice cap, such as the Quelccaya Ice Cap in the Andes of Peru, and analyze them for ancient climate signals." He created the ice core research program at Ohio State while still a graduate student there. In regards to the dedication required to attain this ice, one author writes:

His observations of glacier retreat (1970s–2000s) "confirm that glaciers around the world are melting and provide clear evidence that the warming of the last 50 years is now outside the range of climate variability for several millennia, if not longer." In 2001, he incorrectly predicted that the famed snows of Africa's Mount Kilimanjaro would melt within the next 20 years, a victim of climate change across the tropics. Return expeditions to the mountain have shown that changes in the mountain's ice fields may signal an even quicker melting of its snow fields, which Thompson documented had existed for thousands of years. Thompson and his wife both served as advisers for the Academy Award-winning 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, by Al Gore, Jr., and some of their work was referenced in the movie.

Lonnie Thompson has been married to Ellen Mosley-Thompson for more than 40 years. They met in the 1970s in the Marshall University while he was studying geology and she was pursuing a degree in physics. After their graduation, they both pursued graduate degrees in geology at the Ohio State University. They are now research partners who are both interested in examining the effects of climate change on the world's glacial regions and in developing the technology to drill deep in the ice.

Lonnie Thompson (born July 1, 1948), is an American paleoclimatologist and university professor in the School of Earth Sciences at Ohio State University. He has achieved global recognition for his drilling and analysis of ice cores from ice caps and mountain glaciers in the tropical and sub-tropical regions of the world. He and his wife, Ellen Mosley-Thompson, run the ice core paleoclimatology research group at the Byrd Polar Research Center.

Thompson was born July 1, 1948 in Gassaway, West Virginia and was raised there on a farm. He obtained an undergraduate degree from Marshall University, majoring in geology. He subsequently attended Ohio State University where he received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in geology.