Cave climate pioneer Mira Bar-Matthews receives the Israel Prize in earth sciences

Dr. Mira Bar-Matthews of the Geological Survey of Israel received the Israel Prize in geology, earth sciences and atmospheric sciences at the national ceremony in Jerusalem on 22 April 2026. The prize committee, in a decision announced by Education Minister Yoav Kisch, cited her globally influential research on past climate using cave deposits, which it said had become an international methodological standard.

Bar-Matthews was born and raised in Jerusalem's Beit Hakerem neighbourhood and began studying geology in 1969, continuing at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem before joining the Geological Survey. Her early research looked at how rainwater dissolves rock and then deposits calcium carbonate, the process that builds stalactites and stalagmites. The ratios of oxygen and carbon isotopes locked into each layer keep a record of the rainfall and soil conditions at the time it formed.

In the early 1990s she and her colleague Avner Ayalon were asked to study Soreq Cave near Jerusalem before it opened to visitors. Papers in 1991 and 1996 showed that the cave's formations faithfully track past rainfall. Working with Aaron Kaufman of the Weizmann Institute, she helped bring in uranium-thorium dating, which can fix the age of a layer to within a few hundred years across tens of thousands of years. The result was a continuous record of eastern Mediterranean climate through ice ages and warm periods, which matched marine records and similar data from other Israeli caves. Soreq became one of the world's reference sites for past climate.

She later extended the method to ancient earthquakes, showing that broken, tilted or interrupted stalactites can reveal tremors thousands of years before written records. She has said she wrote her doctorate between the births of her third and fourth children and that early scepticism from colleagues only strengthened her resolve.