At the age of 69, Yao Tandong, a renowned member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), is still busy at work. As the chief scientist of China’s second Tibetan Plateau Scientific Expedition and Research (STEP), he also periodically chairs seminars sharing his team’s research findings.
Over the past four decades, Yao has devoted himself to studying glaciers and environmental changes. He once served as director of the Institute of Tibetan Plateau Research (ITP) under the CAS, and currently still conducts research for the institute and acts as its honorary director.
The second STEP program, launched in 2017 and scheduled to last five to 10 years, aims to study the glaciers, biodiversity and ecological changes, as
