Wolfgang Dreybrodt
Wolfgang Dreybrodt is Emeritus Professor of experimental physics at the University of Bremen, Germany. With research career in solid state physics, biophysics using spectroscopic methods, he entered karst research in early 80s, inspired by the beauty of caves and karst landscape that he encountered as a caver. He contributed fundamental work on dissolution and precipitation kinetics of calcite, growth of stalagmites and the evolution of karst conduits. He was among the first to use reactive transport models to simulate the growth of karst conduits to understand the long-term evolution of karstic systems. His book Processes in Karst Systems published in 1988 laid the foundations of quantitative approach to understand karst and its aquifers. With his students and co-workers he has developed numerous models of karst aquifer evolution in various settings, which culminated in a book Processes of Speleogenesis: A modelling Approach, published in 2005. Thereafter he has worked on the evolution of flank margin caves and the speleogenesis of hypogene caves. During the last decade, he has contributed a series of theoretical and experimental papers on isotopic fractionation of 13C and 18O in stalagmites. He has been elected as a corresponding member of the Slovene Academy of Sciences and Arts since 2021.