This Soviet scientist was the FIRST to talk about climate change!
Grigory Avsyuk was born before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and wanted to become a military topographer. After graduating from the Moscow Geodesic Institute, he journeyed to the Arctic in the 1930s. Then, he went to work for the Main Directorate of the Northern Sea Route.
Several times, he went on expeditions to the Far North and even spent two winters at a polar station.
“Making trips on dog sleds on the Arctic tundra, [Avsyuk] familiarized himself with the polar ice. From then on, ice, first sea ice and then glacial ice, became the main subject of his research,” his colleague Alexander Drozdov wrote.
He studied ice, its evolution, melting processes and movement. He made special maps and schemes of air lines for aviators. It was the young geodesist's data that helped Valery Chkalov, when the pilot planned his legendary non-stop flight across the North Pole.
Avsyuk was also one of the first to understand the connection between glacier melting and climate change, a problem that worries the world today.
And he became one of the fathers of Soviet glaciology, the science of natural ice. He created and headed the Department of Glaciology at the USSR Academy of Sciences and initiated the first observation stations on mountain glaciers.
