Gerald Haug becomes a member of the Royal Society
 

The paleoclimatologist Gerald Haug has been elected as a Foreign Member to the Royal Society of the United Kingdom. With this membership, the Society honors researchers who have made outstanding scientific achievements. Haug is director of the Department of Climate Geochemistry at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, professor at the Department of Earth Sciences at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, and president of the Leopoldina National Academy of Sciences.  

In his work on reconstructing and interpreting past climate changes, Gerald Haug uses sediment cores from oceans and lakes to investigate how climatic conditions controlled the hydrological cycle during the Holocene, the recent geological past, particularly in the tropics. Haug was able to establish a link between tropical precipitation changes and important events in early civilizations. The climate scientist could also show that changes in ocean circulation, particularly in the polar oceans, significantly influenced the carbon cycle to enable the major ice age cycles in the Northern Hemisphere for  2.7 million years.

In 2023, the Royal Society elected 59 Fellows, 19 foreign members, and two honorary members. Currently, the Royal Society has about 1,700 members. Well-known names of the Society are Stephen Hawking, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein and Lise Meitner.