Standing amid a vast expanse of brilliant white ice, arms spread wide, face turned to the sky. Breathing in the cold Arctic air, full of joy and exactly where he wanted to be. That is how colleagues remember Konrad Steffen.
Steffen, a scientist, professor, foremost expert on the Arctic and former director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder, died Saturday in an accident on the Greenland ice sheet. He was 68.
Steffen’s death was announced by the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, where he was the director of the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research.
Steffen — known as Koni to friends and colleagues — joined CIRES as a visiting fellow in 1986, was appointed a climatology professor at CU Boulder in 1990 and became director of CIRES in 2005, leaving in 2012 for his current position in Switzerland.
CIRES Director Waleed Abdalati had Steffen as an advisor in graduate school and later knew him as a mentor and colleague.
Since learning of Steffen’s death, Abdalati has thought a lot about visiting the Swiss Camp on the Greenland ice sheet as a graduate student. Abdalati remembers watching Steffen step out of a helicopter and into “his place,” the camp Steffen founded in 1990 and where he’s conducted decades of research.
“I just remember thinking, he loves this. I hope someday I can be excited about something I work on as he is about this,” Abdalati said. “He passed doing what he loved, where he loved it. As tragic as this is, I’m happy to know he was in his place.”
Steffen gave guidance and advice to students and peers alike, said Ron Weaver, a retired senior associate researcher at CIRES and the National Snow and Ice Data Center.
“He was a warm and gracious person and he was a great mentor, with generosity that he offered to his graduate students and to the wider scientific community,” Weaver said. “He was a visionary scientist in climate change and global climate research. I really think there will be a hole there for a while.”
Steffen’s early research into rapidly-melting Arctic ice shifted his focus onto ice sheets in Greenland and Antartica and the changing climate conditions there. In the decades since establishing the Swiss Camp, he brought countless graduate students and scientists to observe the melting ice and rising sea levels, as well as camera crews and a U.S. congressional delegation.
Steffen had an infectious ability to get people excited about science, Abdalati said, whether they were young graduate students or veteran researchers.
“He had many contributions as a scientist, but he was also a tremendous catalyst for other scientists,” Abdalati said. “When you spent time with Koni, particularly on the ice, you were in the presence of someone special.”