Meinrat Andreae

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

Meinrat O. Andreae studied chemistry, mineralogy, and geochemistry at the Universities of Karlsruhe and Göttingen. In his diploma thesis, he studied 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.

Andreae taught oceanography in the Department of Oceanography at Florida State University in Tallahassee, from 1978 until 1982 as an assistant professor, then from 1982 to 1986 as associate professor, and from 1986 to 1987 as full professor. During this time he researched the biogeochemical cycle of sulfur 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 sulfate 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 the 1980’s, he was together with Paul Crutzen one of the first scientists to discover the worldwide importance of biomass burning.

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