With Speed and Violence Fred Pearce - Global Commons Institute

THE MERCER LEGACY
An Achilles heel at the bottom of the world.
John Mercer was an English eccentric and, frankly, somewhat disreputable.
The list of charges against him is long. He had a penchant for doing his
fieldwork in the nude, and was once convicted for jogging naked near his
campus at Ohio State University, in Columbus. He regularly fell out with
colleagues, and once abandoned two graduate students, including his acolyte
and eventual successor Lonnie Thompson, high in the Andes after the
money ran out on a field trip. Thompson thought it was something he'd said,
until he realized that "those kinds of things kept happening to John; he was
the same with everyone."
Mercer, who died of a brain tumor in 1987, is now a largely forgotten
figure outside the glaciology community. But within it he is regarded by
many, not least Thompson himself, as a genius. In the late 1940s, he set off
alone to explore the ice in distant Patagonia, mapping much of the area, and
came to realize that tropical glaciers might hold clues to the history of the
world's climate. He is credited with inventing the term "greenhouse effect"
during a symposium at Ohio State in the early 1960s. But probably his
greatest legacy is in Antarctica, where back in the 1960s he made a prophetic
warning that may one day ensure the revival of his memory.