Andrey Kapitsa
Andrei Petrovich Kapitsa (Russian: Андрей Петрович Капица; born July 9, 1931 in Cambridge, England; † August 2, 2011 in Moscow) was a Russian geographer and Antarctic explorer. He is considered the discoverer of the Wostoksees, the largest subglacial lake under the ice sheet of Antarctica.
The existence of the lake, however, was at first, in the late 1950s, only a hypothesis based on the results of seismic measurements in the vicinity of Vostok station, which was only in 1996 confirmed unequivocally by a Russian- British team. The discovery of Wostoksees is considered one of the most remarkable geographical discoveries of the 20th century and one of the last great geographical discoveries of the earth at all.
Life
Andrei Kapitsa came from a Russian scientist family: his father was the Nobel Prize winner Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa, his grandfather ( his mother Anna Alexeyevna Krylova father ) was the naval architect and mathematician Alexei Nikolaevich Krylov, his older brother Sergei was a physicist and long-time host of a science program on Russian TV.
He was born as his brother Sergei in Cambridge, where his father worked at the time as director at the university. After the father of the re- emigration from the USSR was denied in 1934, the family lived in Moscow.
1953, Andrei Kapitsa at the Geographical Faculty of the Moscow State University 's financial statements. Subsequently, he worked in the laboratory of Experimental Geomorphology of the faculty.
In 1958, as the " candidate of sciences " ( кандидат наук ) defending his thesis " morphology of the ice sheet of East Antarctica " ( " Морфология ледникового покрова Восточной Антарктиды "). In 1965, the doctoral thesis " subglacial relief of Antarctica " followed ( " Подлёдный рельеф Антарктиды ").
Between 1955 and 1964, he participated in four Soviet Antarctic expeditions.
Andrei Kapitsa used the case made seismic measurements in the vicinity of Vostok Station from 1959 and 1964 to determine the thickness of the ice sheet.
At the same time, the results led him to believe that at this point a large subglacial lake is, which he named after the station Vostok. After further research, this thesis could also only support, but not prove successful this unequivocal proof of a Russian-British team in 1996 through the combination of different measurement methods and data.
In the years 1967 to 1969, he headed a East African Expedition of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Between 1965 and 1970 he was the dean of the Geographical Faculty of Moscow State University.
Andrei Kapitsa was in 1970 elected as an associate member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
In 1972 he initiated the establishment of the Soviet Pacific Institute of Geography, Vladivostok, he was its first director.
In 1977 he returned to Moscow due to illness and to his old alma mater. There he took over in 1978 the management of the Department of Physical Geography and Paleogeography of the same faculty. After the reorganization in 1987, he founded the Institute for Rational Use of Natural Resources and was its director.
At the same time, he was from 1978 to 1990 Deputy Minister of Science of the USSR and Chairman of the Scientific Council of the USSR.
In his further scientific research Andrei Kapitsa took early on the topics " greenhouse effect ," Global warming and in particular of the ozone hole over Antarctica. This culminated in the last decade of his life on the one hand in the work, " A methodology for assesing the state of Arctic ecosystems Transformed by human activities", on the other hand, he developed together with AA Gavrilov a theory to the natural origin of the anomalies of the Antarctic ozone hole. His hypotheses about human influence, or rather non- influence on the global climate found no support among the majority of the scientific community.
At the age of 80 years Kapitsa died on 2 August 2011 in Moscow - less before Russian scientists drilling time after twenty years the ice sheet broke through to Lake Vostok on 20 February 2012 as half a year.