Meinrat Andreae

Meinrat O. Andreae, born in 1949 in Augsburg, is a German mineralogist. Since 1987, he has worked as Director and Scientific Member at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry (MPIC) in Mainz.

Biography

He studied mineralogy and geochemistry at the Universities of Karlsruhe and Göttingen. In his diploma thesis, he dealt with the chemical composition and isotope geochemistry of highly metamorphic rocks of southern Norway. In 1977, he completed his PhD in oceanography from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California at San Diego. In his doctoral thesis, he examined the chemical speciation of arsenic in the ocean. He discovered that planktonic algae regulate the oxidation state of arsenic in seawater and synthesize a variety of organoarsenic compounds. A secondary discovery of his work was that marine phytoplankton also manufactures the raw materials for the volatile sulfur compound dimethyl sulfide.

He worked from 1978 until 1982 as an assistant professor of oceanography, and from 1982 to 1986 as an associate professor of oceanography. Andreae then taught at Florida State University as a professor of oceanography. During this time he researched the biogeochemical sulfur cycle in the ocean and in the atmosphere. Along with Robert Jay Charlson, James Lovelock, and Stephen G. Warren, he developed the CLAW hypothesis, named after the initials of the authors. This hypothesis states that dimethyl sulfide from the ocean is converted in the atmosphere to sulphate particles, which then influence the formation of clouds and therefore the climate. Other works from this period were concerned with biogeochemical transformations of compounds of arsenic, antimony, selenium, tellurium and tin in the marine and terrestrial ecosystems.

In 1987 he was appointed member of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry (MPIC) in Mainz as director and scientific member. He has since established himself with his entry into the Institute Biogeochemistry Department. There, he continued his work on biogeochemical cycles of trace metals, and extended his studies on the formation of aerosols of marine sulfur emissions. Campaigns in the Amazon forest then led to a new focus, the biogeochemical processes of exchange between tropical forests and the atmosphere. On expeditions in the Congo, the Amazon, and Southern Africa he studied the emissions from vegetation fires, the exchange of trace gases, and the production of biogenic aerosol particles. Since 2000, research into the role of atmospheric aerosols in the climate system has been at the center of Andreae's research. In 2009, he began heading a working group, applying methods of isotope geochemistry and mass spectrometry to problems of paleoclimatology and marine biogeochemistry.

As a visiting professor, Andreae taught at the University of Antwerp, the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, the University of California, Irvine and the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He is a member of the scientific steering committee of the Large Scale Biosphere Atmosphere Experiment in Amazonia (LBA) and was chairman of the IGBP’s Integrated land Ecosystem Atmospheric Processes Study (ILEAPS). In addition, Andreae was hired as reviewing editor of the journal Science. In 2009 he became a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in 2013 he was elected as a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2014 he was awarded the Waldo E. Smith Medal and became a fellow of the American Geophysical Union.

Meinrat O. Andreae and his conworkers have published over 400 articles in scientific journals and books.

Research

The employees of the MPIC Department of Biogeochemistry, in close cooperation with the Department of Atmospheric Chemistry, study interactions between the atmosphere and bio- or physio sphere of our planet. The results of these studies contribute to the understanding of global biogeochemical cycles. They also use to understand the very complex and global climate processes. Using modeling techniques, it may then be estimated the impact of mankind on these processes and the consequences thereof.