Wallace Smith Broecker was born on November 29, 1931. He received a bachelor's degree in physics and a Ph.D. in geology from Columbia University. He joined the faculty there in 1959. He was one of the first scientists to sound the alarm about climate change and the researcher who popularized the term global warming. He published a landmark scientific paper entitled Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming in 1975. He pioneered techniques using carbon isotopes and other trace elements to map the world's ocean currents. He wrote more than 500 research papers and more than 15 books. He received the National Medal of in 1996. He died of congestive heart failure on February 18, 2019 at the age of 87.
