Nicholas John Shackleton

Sir Nicholas John Shackleton was an English geologist and paleoclimatologist born June 23, 1937, who died January 24, 2006, and who worked in the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of Cambridge, directing its Godwin Institute for Quaternary Research from 1995. He pioneered applying mass spectrometry to oxygen isotope composition in microfossils for climate reconstruction, showed that Earth last magnetic field reversal occurred 780,000 years ago, and co-authored the landmark 1976 paper Variations in the Earth Orbit, Pacemaker of the Ice Ages, correlating climate oscillations with orbital variations using ocean sediment cores across more than two hundred publications. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1985, received the Lyell Medal in 1987 and the Wollaston Medal in 1996, was knighted for services to earth sciences in 1998, and received the Vetlesen Prize in 2004 and the Blue Planet Prize in 2005.