A Lamont scientist will receive a prestigious geology prize next month in London, joining a legion of scientific greats.

As a marine geologist and climate scientist, Maureen Raymo of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory has surveyed ancient shorelines in South Africa, desolate Australian coastlines and rocky slopes in the Himalayas.

Her travels once took her to the Geological Society of London as an 8-year-old in the grasp of her father, a former physics professor, writer and naturalist. She'll return next month to the historic stone building on Piccadilly to join Charles Darwin and a legion of scientific greats as a winner of the society's Wollaston Medal — the first woman to do so in the prize's 183-year history.

The thrill of winning as a scientist "is first and foremost" on her mind, she said. A Piermont resident, Raymo said she wasn't aware she was the first female honoree until the email inviting her to London arrived this winter.

James Scourse, a marine geologist at Bangor University in Wales, nominated her. He uses Raymo's work in his teaching and offers her as a role model for young scientists.

"Maureen is an outstandingly creative scientist who has been setting the agenda in our study of the history of the ocean, and the Earth as a whole, for three decades now. It's impossible to work in this field without being influenced by her ideas and writings," he said in an e-mail.

Science, she said, is often about competition for grants and getting published.

"So when you get an award like that, it's like everybody stepped back and said we like the work you've done," said Raymo, a mother of two.

Raymo has explained the long-ago timing of ice ages and how the creation of the Himalayas some 40 million years ago may have helped cool the planet. Now, she is deciphering what the increasing level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere means for sea-level rise and the melting of the Greenland and West Antarctica ice sheets.

Along with Darwin, her name will be listed with those who described dinosaurs and first proposed an ice age took place. Raymo earned her Ph.D. from Columbia in 1989. One of her professors, Wallace Broecker, who is credited with first using the term global warming in a scientific paper, won his Wollaston in 1990.

The prize derives its prestige from its past winners, said G. Michael Purdy, Columbia's executive vice president for research and a native of England who earned his Ph.D. at Cambridge. The prize is minted from a silvery metal known as palladium discovered by William Hyde Wollaston in the early 1800s.

"I think it's more than an Oscar. They give away lots of Oscars every year. This is bigger than an Oscar," Purdy said.

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