Ding Zhongli, male, Han nationality, is a native of
Zhejiang province. He was born in 1957, graduated
from Zhejiang University, and received a doctorate
from the Institute of Geology of the Chinese Academy
of Sciences. He is presently a professor and the
director of the Institute of Geology and Geophysics of
the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He also serves as
vice-chairman of the Chinese Quaternary Science
Committee. He became vice-president of the Chinese
Academy of Sciences in 2008.
Ding Zhongli has been researching paleoclimatology
and the Chinese loess deposits for over twenty years.
He and his co-authors systematically investigated the
loess stratigraphy of the Loess Plateau, demonstrated
the continuity of the loess-soil sequence by
correlating the loess sections of the Plateau, and
subdivided the loess deposits into 37
pedostratigraphical units in the past 2.6 Ma. He
established an orbitally-tuned time scale for the
loess sequence on the basis of the Baoji grain-size
record, and detected the major Milankovitch climate
periodicities from it and identified three climatic
shift events that happened at about 2.6, 1.6 and 0.8
Ma BR. By correlating the climate records of the loess
with those of the deep-sea sediments, he showed that
changes in global ice volume may have been a major
factor in driving glacia-interglacial variations of
the Asian monsoon system over the past 0.8 Ma. In
recent years, he studied the magnetostratigraphy,
sedimentology and geochemistry of the red clay
deposits underlying the quaternary loess in the Loess
Plateau, and provided more evidence for the wind-blown
origin of the red clay. He extended the eolian record
in the Plateau to about 8 Ma.
Ding Zhongli has published about 150 papers to date,
with 65 of them in the academy's journals. His results
have been cited 998 times, ranking him as one of the
top 1% of citation authors in the global earth science
community in the past decade. In 2017 he became Chairman of the Central Committee of the China Democratic League.