East Lyme — John Jasper has none of the grizzled look one associates with the world's great explorers but, like most scientists, he has a bit of the renegade in him.

Perhaps his most exciting adventure involved a 2004 Off Soundings sailboat race aboard the Salud, informally known as the Pfizer boat, with Reinhard Sarges captaining in gale-force winds.

"It was illuminating to see the dark gray bands of a hurricane passing us off our bow and another approaching off our stern," Jasper said with delight. "Catches your attention."

Jasper, a former Pfizer Inc. scientist, also had adventures farther afield, in Lake Michigan in 1983 while helmsman in a Chicago-to-Mackinac race rolling with 6-foot waves breaking across the deck, and off the Kona coast of Hawaii aboard the 43-foot Rivendel II in 10- to 15-foot waves "surfing" the several-ton vehicle with two fingers on both sides of the wheel.

He also served as scientific navigator aboard the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution's R/V Atlantis II in the gulf of northern California when he and ship captain Dick Colburn discovered an unmapped section of the global rift system.

"Did you see that?" Colburn asked Jasper as he viewed one of the ship's instruments.

Jasper, using another instrument, acknowledged he had, and they reported their findings to the U.S. Defense Mapping Agency.

Indeed, discoveries are nothing new for Jasper, who holds a doctorate in marine organic geochemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, as well as two U.S. patents.

For instance, in 1990 he, fellow researcher John M. Hayes and succeeding colleagues were able to trace the history of carbon dioxide levels in the earth's atmosphere going back 40 million years, confirming that the rise of so-called greenhouse gases has been a recent and dramatic phenomenon.

"In the last 200 years it's actually increased by about 45 percent as recorded in ice cores," he said. "We're diagnosticians. We helped understand what the natural background used to be."

He also has been at the forefront of using isotope technology to trace the derivation of synthetic drugs to help with process patent protections of some $2 billion in pharmaceutical sales. Along the way, he has given advice to the FBI, offered presentations to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and worked with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, as well.

For these discoveries and more, Jasper was elected earlier this year as a fellow in the New York City-based Explorers Club. He estimated only about 20 to 40 new fellows are admitted annually to the prestigious club, whose members in the past have included Edmund Hillary, the first to summit Mount Everest; polar explorer Ernest Shackleton; President Theodore Roosevelt; and, in modern times, NASA astronaut Buzz Aldrin and astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Jasper, interviewed at the East Lyme Starbucks, said he hadn't really considered membership in the Explorers Club until its annual dinner last March, when he was invited by his sister, an associate member, to attend. He soon struck up a conversation with ocean scientist Martha Shaw, and was later joined by Ted Janulis, president of the club, who immediately was impressed by Jasper's background in charting carbon dioxide gases trapped via deep sea sediment cores.

Janulis suggested Jasper apply for membership, which he did, only to be surprised by the club's acceptance of him as a Fellow National — the second highest ranking in the century-old organization.

"John has a long and distinguished career as a chemist, and has not only lab work, but years of field work to attest to his accomplishments," Janulis said in his letter co-sponsoring Jasper's membership. "His projects focusing on sampling of oceanic water column and sediments for biogeochemical analyses spanned two decades and included locations in the southeastern Atlantic Ocean, northern Gulf of Mexico, northeast Atlantic, east Pacific, the Sargasso Sea and the Black Sea."

The Explorers Club was founded in 1904 with the intention of promoting the scientific exploration of land, sea, air and space while supporting basic research. Its members have been noted for a number of firsts, including races to the South and North poles, the deepest ocean dive and the farthest space exploration.

"These are real people with real careers," Jasper said.

For a number of years now, Jasper has been out of the paleo-oceanographic work that helped earn him the Explorers Club fellowship, but he said he's glad his groundbreaking work has now been recognized, though he is quick to tick off a list of many others who contributed, as well.

He's also very happy to report that his daughter, East Lyme High School graduate Claire Jasper, recently took a new position in global climate research at Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University. She is working at Lamont's deep sea sediment core repository as well as studying ancient sea level changes with Professor Maureen Raymo.

It's a career her dad was surprised she decided to pursue but which he found pleasing.

In fact, all of Jasper's various lines of research have fully absorbed his attention, and he talks of his current work for Molecular Isotope Technologies under the brand name Nature's Fingerprint with the same excitement as a young science major doing his first experiment.

"I like it," said Jasper, the company's chief scientific officer. "I find it rewarding."

 l.howard@theday.com