Paul Crutzen, the Dutch atmospheric chemist who was a co-recipient of the 1995 Nobel prize for chemistry for his work on stratospheric ozone destruction, died on 28 January at the age of 87 following several years of illness.
His passing means that all three chemists who won that pivotal award for atmospheric chemistry are gone now. One of the other two co-recipients of the award, Mexican chemist Mario Molina, died just this past October, and the other joint winner, American chemist Sherwood Rowland, passed away in 2012.
Crutzen, who demonstrated that nitrogen oxides accelerate the depletion of the Earth’s ozone layer, popularised the term Anthropocene in 2000 to define the current geological era in which human activity is influencing the planet. He was also one of the early adopters of proton transfer mass spectrometry in atmospheric research.
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