Earth and atmospheric sciences

The TRAPPIST-1 star, an ultra-cool dwarf, has seven Earth-size planets orbiting it.

3Q: Julien de Wit on the discovery of seven temperate, nearby worlds

Planets may harbor conditions suitable for sustaining liquid water — and thus life.

February 22, 2017

Ozone exacts a particularly heavy toll on people living in economically disadvantaged areas, where industrial and power plants tend to cluster. While policies have been implemented to reduce ozone emissions across the country, they have not yet addressed built-in inequities in the U.S. economy, leaving low-income Americans at greatest risk for health and economic damages.

Modeling the unequal benefits of U.S. environmental policy

New toolset evaluates economic impacts of ozone reduction policies for nine income groups.

February 15, 2017

“The ultimate objective,” atmospheric scientist Jesse Kroll says, “is to understand what policies could help, and what changes policymakers could make to minimize the negative health and climate effects of particulate pollution.”

Zeroing in on the chemistry of the air

Jesse Kroll examines how pollutants change chemically as they waft around the globe.

February 1, 2017

Celebrating Pauline Morrow Austin, a founder of radar meteorology

MIT faculty, friends, and family gathered to remember Austin's life and commemorate her contributions to science with the unveiling of an exhibit in EAPS.

January 31, 2017

MIT Institute Professor Sallie (Penny) Chisholm poses with the first two books in the “Sunlight Series,” a collection of children's books that teach Earth's natural processes from the point of view of the sun.

How the smallest, most abundant bacteria inspired a children's book series

Institute Professor Penny Chisholm teams up with author and illustrator Molly Bang to write environmental children’s book series.

January 31, 2017

“There’s no question that carbon dioxide is the biggest contributor to human-caused climate change, so that’s the big focus of mitigation efforts. But there are a number of others that are also significant,” says Jessika Trancik, the Atlantic Richfield Career Development Associate Professor in Energy Studies at MIT’s Institute for Data, Systems, and Society.

Explained: Greenhouse gases

Carbon dioxide isn’t the only one that matters, and the gases vary widely in potency and duration.

January 30, 2017

Projecting food, water, energy, climate and other global changes

Marking 25 years of science and policy studies, the MIT Joint Program launches new website showcasing its expanded research portfolio.

January 27, 2017

The SMAP observations are providing an unprecedented level of detailed, worldwide information on the amount of water in the top 2 inches (5 centimeters) of soil, collected globally every two to three days.

Study tracks “memory” of soil moisture

First year of data from SMAP satellite provides new insights for weather, agriculture, and climate.

January 16, 2017

Researchers report that warming from short-lived compounds — greenhouse gases such as methane and chlorofluorocarbons, that linger in the atmosphere for just a year to a few decades — can cause sea levels to rise for hundreds of years after the pollutants have been cleared from the atmosphere.

Short-lived greenhouse gases cause centuries of sea-level rise

Through warming effects, methane and other gases impact rising seas long after leaving the atmosphere.

January 9, 2017

Left: An artist’s conception of the Lucy spacecraft flying by the Trojan Eurybates — one of the six diverse and scientifically important Trojans asteroids to be studied. Right: Psyche, the first mission to a metal asteroid, will map features, structure, composition, and magnetic field, and examine a landscape unlike anything explored before.

Twin wins for planetary exploration

MIT scientists and alumni well represented on newly announced NASA asteroid missions Psyche and Lucy.

January 5, 2017

MIT scientists have found that extreme precipitation events in California should become more frequent as the Earth’s climate warms over this century.

Study finds more extreme storms ahead for California

New technique predicts frequency of heavy precipitation with global warming.

January 3, 2017

Dust blowing through the Sahara Desert in 2012. Researchers have found that the plume was far less dusty between 5,000 and 11,000 years ago, containing only half the amount of dust that is transported today.

Saharan dust in the wind

Scientists find huge reduction in African dust plume led to stronger Saharan monsoons 11,000 years ago.

November 23, 2016

A capacity crowd at the New England Aquarium's Omni Theater enjoyed the 2016 John H. Carlson Lecture, "Big Ice: Antarctica, Greenland, and Boston," presented by Penn State University Professor Richard Alley.

Big ice, big science

Richard Alley delivers 2016 Carlson Lecture on the physics of glaciers and how ice sheets capture a history of the world’s climate.

November 14, 2016

This image shows free-air gravitational anomalies and a shaded topographic relief of the Moon’s 930-km-diameter Orientale impact basin. Red corresponds to mass excesses and blue to mass deficits relative to a reference value. This gravitational field model, based on measurements acquired from the NASA GRAIL mission, shows the detailed structure of the central basin depression that is filled with...

Retracing the origins of a massive, multi-ring crater

Scientists reconstruct first hours after a giant impact created one of the largest craters on the moon.

October 27, 2016

MIT research scientist Stephanie Dutkiewicz in her office with a display of her phytoplankton model simulation

Computing the ocean’s true colors

Stephanie Dutkiewicz’ phytoplankton models project the future of the ocean as food source and carbon sink.

September 15, 2016

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