Climate & Weather
Why the West Wind Wobbles
Winds and temperatures in Earth’s atmosphere vary from month to month and year to year in countless ways. Decades of monitoring the weather and climate have revealed a few simple […]
Sunspots, Sea Changes, and Climate Shifts
Natural materials such as shells, ice, corals, and tree rings contain clues to help scientists…
Lakes and Climates Have Their Ups and Downs
Between 5,400 and 3,000 years ago, something happened to New England’s climate. The region became…
How Long Can the Ocean Slow Global Warming?
It is 4:30 a.m., far from land. A group of scientists clad in bright yellow…
Ocean Circulation and a Clam Far From Home
In my first year of graduate school, I was stumped by a big question on…
The Once and Future Circulation of the Ocean
The short history of modern oceanographic observations—less than a century’s worth, really—doesn’t give us a…
What Other Tales Can Coral Skeletons Tell?
In 2003, we traveled by ship to the New England Seamounts—a chain of extinct, undersea…
The Coral-Climate Connection
Are the climate changes we perceive today just part of the Earth system’s natural variability,…
Analyzing Ancient Sediments at Warp Speed
Like a toy out of a science fiction story, the X-ray fluorescence core scanner reveals…
An Ocean Warmer Than a Hot Tub
Scientists have found evidence that tropical Atlantic Ocean temperatures may have once reached 107°F (42°C)—about…
The Flywheel of the Arctic Climate Engine
A key component of the Arctic climate clockworks is the Beaufort Gyre?a bowl of cold,…
Is Global Warming Changing the Arctic?
In the Arctic, the air, sea ice, and underlying ocean all interact in a delicately…
Fresher Ocean, Cooler Climate
Large and climatically sensitive regions of the North Atlantic Ocean have become less salty since…
Joyce, Evans Give Testimony on Oceans to Congress
WHOI scientists Rob Evans and Terry Joyce testified June 8 before the House Subcommittee on…
The Great Flood of New York
An ice dam forming a large Ice Age lake collapsed 13,350 years ago, sending a…
Rising Sea Levels and Moving Shorelines
Changes to the shoreline are inevitable and inescapable. Shoals and sandbars become islands and then…
How the Isthmus of Panama Put Ice in the Arctic
The long lag time has always puzzled scientists: Why did Antarctica become covered by massive…
Shifting Continents and Climates
Sixty-five millions years ago, dinosaurs had just become extinct, and mammals were starting to dominate…
Moving Earth and Heaven
The mountains rise, are lashed by wind and weather, and erode. The rivers carry mud…
Ground-Truthing the Paleoclimate Record
Sediment Trap Observations Aid Paleoceanographers The geological record contains a wealth of information about Earth's…
Oceans & Climate
The past decade has brought rapid scientific progress in understanding the role of the ocean…
Sedimentary Record Yields Several Centuries of Data
Natural climate changes like the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period are of…