This singular destiny nothing does the portended a priori

Don't go believing that Yves Frenot is permanently anchored at Brest by taking the direction of the Polar Institute Paul-Emile Victor (ENPI) French. The Director of research at the CNRS of fifty-two years, specialist in the study of the impact of introduced species and climate change on ecosystems, intend to continue his scientific adventure in Antarctica, where it has already accomplished more than 40 missions. It will continue to see surveying wild and icy bodies of Amsterdam island and the Kerguelen, from men but closer to the nature, flora and fauna.

This singular destiny, nothing does the portended a priori. The son of a police Commissioner, Yves Frenot is before all a product of the charentais soil, even though he spent much of his schooling in La Rochelle before earning Poitiers to its preparatory classes. "In fact, he says, it is in Brittany, in my studies of Agronomy in Rennes, that I have taste the southern seas." Just graduated, he indeed accept a journey of thirteen months in the Crozet Islands, a sub-Antarctic archipelago of the South of the Indian Ocean. The purpose of the journey: the study of earth worms living in the soil of these islands. A mission for the less unusual but which will contribute to further his knowledge. And it will be enthused to point to the subject of his thesis.

The love of southern

He gets it in 1986, year where he joined a team of the CNRS located in Paimpont, near Rennes. "I there stayed thirteen years, with the responsibility of a comprehensive programme of work on southern and the sub-Antarctic Islands." He particularly studied magnifying glass the consequences of the withdrawal of glaciers in the Kerguelen Islands, with the emergence of a new vegetation due to global warming. He also spent through the consequences of the introduction of new animal species. "Cats arrived in the 1950s." From my calculations, there no were then only 6; Today, the colony is$ 7,000.

It was in 2002 that Gérard Jugie, the Director of the ENPI, uses his skills of biologist and asked him to assist the head of the High Institute of 50 employees for a little less than 30 million euros of annual budget. The researcher then moved to Brest, near the center of the Ifremer where the French Polar Institute has its premises. But the monitoring of the various scientific programmes conducted by the ENPI requires away very often in his Office with views of the harbour. "These programs are countless and carried out by external researchers, because the French Polar Institute does not own teams", he said.

In 2007 author of a book soberly entitled: "polar regions: what is at stake", Yves Frenot is before all a man of action who cannot stay long in place or resist the appeal of offshore. As early as next month, a new mission the bring on the sub-Antarctic Islands. Single and without children, it is probably easier than others to live this life of scribe it in parentheses that the space of a few weeks each summer, time to take advantage of the family home and enjoy the charms of the charentaise countryside.