On July 27, 2017, the American Geophysical Union (AGU) announced their 2017 AGU Fellowson their official website, representing an honor given to individual AGU members who have made exceptional scientific contributions and gained prominence in their respective fields of Earth and space sciences. XJTU Professor Cheng Hai, scholar of National Thousand Talents Program, Institute of Global Environmental Change, is on the list.

Professor Cheng Hai developed U-Th mass spectrometry further at an international advanced level, established the isotope records of stalagmites with high resolution and serves precision year dating, as well as the correlation between the records and global climate change, providing an important chronological scale for the precise comparison of climate changes among different climate systems. These all become one of the important bases for understanding global climate change.

Professor Cheng Hai has published more than 300 papers, over 20 of which have been published onScienceand Nature. In 2016, Professor Cheng Hai published an article on Nature, in which he extended the oxygen isotope records of stalagmites in Asian Monsoon region to the past 640,000 years. That is, the age limit of the U-Th dating method, confirming that the variation of solar radiation caused by the Earth’s precession drove the termination of the last seven ice ages.The project that contained the above research results won a spot in the top 10 scientific and technological progress of Chinese universities in 2016.