From the inaccessible depths of the terrestrial interior to the vast reaches of our galaxy, our planet and the natural systems surrounding it provide important clues to the course of our future. At MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), we examine the history and interactions of these systems in order to predict future events and states with greater accuracy. Learn more
Geobiologist, and Hayes Career Dev. Assoc. Professor in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences, Tanja Bosak studies microbial fossils to understand the parallel evolution of life and the environment. She also undertakes laboratory experiments on modern microbes to ...
Geomorphologist Taylor Perron loves figuring out how landscapes tick. His group is particularly intersted in how patterns emerge in landscapes (from river networks to ripples in sand at the shoreline), how climate, and especially rainfall and sunlight, influence ...
Kerry Emanuel, '76, PhD '78, Professor of Atmospheric ScienceDescription: As the costs of Hurricane Katrina continue to spiral higher — to date, $125 billion in damages and 1,200 deaths — there's keen interest in perfecting the science of hurricane forecasting. The ...
Since 2001, Lodovica Illari and her colleague John Marshall have worked to make rotating fluid dynamics more intuitive for undergraduate students studying weather and climate, using a demonstration aptly named "Weather in a Tank."
Read more about Principal Research Scientist Patrick Heimbach's work in MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT News, the MITgcm website, and the website for NASA's ECCO2.About the animation: The simulation was conducted with the MIT coupled ocean-sea ice general ...
A missile-targeting technology is adapted to process aerial photos into 3-D city maps sharper than Google Earth's.
Simulation of the orbit of the ultracool subdwarf LSR 1610-0040 around the Milky Way, as visualized using Digital Universe.
The rare coincidence in the orbit of the moon and sun was captured by Mike Krawczynski PhD '11.
Mike Floyd, a postdoc in the Department of Earth, Atmopheric, and Planetary Sciences at MIT, uses GPS to track the vanishingly slow, yet inexorable movement of the tectonic plates underlying the Caucasus. In this video he shares work he and co-workers recently published showing ...
Professor Susan SolomonEllen Swallow Richards Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Climate Science at MITDean of Science's Colloquium: “The World’s Chemistry in Our Hands: Global Environmental Challenges Past and Future”September 13, 2012 Humans ...
Benjamin Weiss is conducting laboratory magnetic studies on rocks from Mars, the Moon, and Earth to understand the evolution of planets, magnetism, and life. He is using SQUID microscopy, a new technique several orders of magnitude more sensitive than standard ...
A team of researchers from 8 countries is trying to understand the links between the largest continental volcanic eruption (the Siberian flood basalts) and the largest extinction in Earth history (the end-Permian). Funded by NSF, we are in the middle of a five-year ...
Gonzalo Carrasco is a postdoc. working in Ed Boyle's Lab. His main interests are the study of trace metals of biogeochemical importance, focusing on their concentration, chemical speciation and isotopic fractionation in water, sediments and biological records, aiming ...
Alison Malcolm is an Assistant Professor of Geophysics in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences at MIT.
Researcher Tammy Thompson attended the American Geophysical Union's Science Policy Conference this month. In this video, Thompson explains the research she did that the conference highlighted. To view Thompson's poster from the conference, click here. In her research, ...
Francesca DeMeo has a passion for asteroids. This former EAPS undergraduate, back at MIT after a stint at grad school in Paris, is currently a postdoc in Rick Binzel's Group. In this interview, Francesca shares her excitement and fascination about these abundant and varied bodies. Video ...
Stacy is a 5th year master's student in EAPS. Her thesis work focuses on assessing the economic value of seasonal hurricane forecasts based on insurance and reinsurance company interactions and information asymmetries. Her advisor is Kerry Emanuel. In this interview she shares a ...
Researchers at MIT and UT-Knoxville have analyzed images of Titan's river networks and determined that in some regions, rivers have created surprisingly little erosion.
Yodit Tewelde is a graduate student in the Planetary Science Program in EAPS. Childhood planetarium visits and a love of reading science fiction novels, meant Yodit always suspected space or space exploration was somewhere in a her future. In High School, while she ...
This animation nicely highlights the energetic turbulent ocean surface currents that are present in the real ocean but are not directly visible to the eye.
