Adonis Diaries

Atmospheric physics? Who is Toufic Hawaat?

For 50 years, scientists have been visiting the North and South Poles to study the atmosphere and matching their various models to data gathered painstakingly, under harsh climatic conditions…

Toufic Hawaat is one of these researches and physicists who spent 8 years in the Poles, three months at a stretch during the Poles summer seasons: The temperature drops to minus 122 in the winter and you’ll be stuck for an entire year there if the team makes the grave mistake of visiting the Poles in winter time.

The temperature in the South Pole in summer time is a mild minus 80 degrees Celsius, and the team members of researchers live within iced walls, and feed on biscuits tasting beef and pizza and canned food…

Toufic Hawaat is born in Lebanon in the town of Bte3bourat in the district of Koura.  He got his engineering degree from the University of Lebanon and resumed higher education in Paris, receiving his Ph.D on the physics of atmospheric constitution and phenomena…

For 6 years, Toufic worked for the French public CNF and had to travel to the North Pole in 1994 at the age of 25. He visited the North Pole 6 times and planted the Lebanese flag (the first time ever).

In 1998, Toufic met with an American research team from the University of Denver, doing the same kind of research. The US team offered Toufic the Green Card and dispatched him to the South Pole.

Antarctica is 5 times as vast as the USA and snow is 9,000 meters thick, and it takes 38 hours to reach destination.

So far, Dr. Hawaat has published 48 peer-reviewed scientific articles and will deliver a speech at Rio 20+. The collected and analyzed data reveal a steady increase in natural calamities since 1972, and going worse by the year.

Toufic do visit his hometown in Lebanon, now and then, with his family (his wife is also from Lebanon), but he claims that the air and water in Lebanon are too polluted to reside here. He has no plans of settling in Lebanon…

Note: This post was inspired from an interview conducted by Pascal Azar to the Lebanese daily Al Nahar.