He studied chemistry and physics at the University of Grenoble and received a PhD in 1984 in paleoclimatology on the study of the aeolian dust record from Antarctic ice cores.
In 1999 he was the lead author of a study published in Nature, "Climate and atmospheric history of the past 420,000 years from the Vostok ice core, Antarctica.
The data extracted from this ice core had implications throughout the fields of glaciology and paleoclimatology.
One of the concluding remarks was that present day levels of carbon dioxide and methane seem to have been unprecedented during the past 420,000 years.
[2] He was also a member of the EPICA project, a European team that drilled an ice core at Dome C that provided, in 2004, a 740,000-year climate record.