When I was an active space scientist under the directorship of Sir Ian Axford at the Max-Planck Institute for Aeronomy in Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, the American Geophysical Union was our favorite organization: publishing in JGR and attending at least the annual Fall Meetings in San Francisco was an absolute must. Besides we attended the meetings of COSPAR and IAGA and of the German AEP....

The project ISOTRACE, developed under the umbrella of the European Science Foundation (ESF) and its EUROCORES EuroCLIMATE program (http://www.esf.org/activities/eurocores/completed-programmes/euroclimate.html) had the aim to test a set of new potential isotope tracers that could be used in ice core science. Because of the complexity to establish a direct relationship between the chemical information buried in ice, the chemical state of the atmosphere and finally the interaction between the chemistry and the climate, ISOTRACE was limited to provide the first elements using a top-down approach, i.e. starting from the present atmosphere down to the air/snow transfer. We explored the possibilities offered by the recently discovered sulfur and oxygen isotope anomalies. We found that the former offers great potentials to derive the climate forcing induced by volcanoes while the latter is a faithful transcription of the oxidative state of the atmosphere. In the years to come, applications of these new tools to ice cores should start to lift part of the veil on the climate-chemistry relationship....