Prof. em. Dr. Rainer Wieler

Rainer Wieler is a senior scientist emeritus at the Institute of Geochemistry and Petrology at the Department of Earth Sciences. In spring 2000 he was given the title of Profesor at ETH Zurich. Until his retirement in 2014 he led the laboratory of noble gas geochemistry and cosmochemistry. Since then he acts as a guest scientist.

Born September 15, 1949 in Egg, canton Zurich, he studied physics at ETH Züich. After a one year stage in Guayaquil, Ecuador, he made his PhD thesis in noble gas cosmochemistry with Prof. P. Signer at the then Institute for Crystallography and Petrography at ETH Zurich. There he also spent his post-doc years and submitted in 1991 his habilitation thesis in planetary sciences. Since 1994 he is leading the noble gas laboratory, since 1999 together with Prof. A. N. Halliday. He is an associate editor of the journals Meteoritics and Planetary Science and Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta.

His main research interests are to decipher early solar system history with isotope studies on meteorites, to study the solar corpuscular radiation in the past by means of noble gas analyses in lunar soils and meteorites, to date landscape elements with cosmic-ray-produced nuclides, and noble gases in the terrestrial crust and mantle. Noble gases in lakes and groundwaters form a further major research area of the laboratory with the aim of studying paleoclimatic and environmental problems.