News Archive - 2011

Twin GRAIL Spacecraft on Final Approach for Moon Orbit

December 29, 2011

As of Dec. 28 GRAIL-A was 65 860 miles from the moon closing at a speed of 745 mph. GRAIL-B was 79 540 miles from the moon closing at a speed of 763mph. "This Mission will rewrite the textbooks on the evolution of the moon," said GRAIL PI Maria Zuber.

Season's Greetings from MIT

December 23, 2011

Happy Holidays!

EPA regulates emissions of mercury, arsenic and many other toxins

December 22, 2011

PAOC's Noelle Selin speaks with the LA Times about the new rules.

Proposal for MIT Global Environment Initiative seeks public comment

December 22, 2011

Oceans and Climate will be two among six foci for MIT's new Global Environmental Initiative.

EAPS goes to AGU - Fall 2011

December 21, 2011

Over 70 members of EAPS presented their work at the annual AGU meeting last week.

Two new Earth-sized exoplanets discovered

December 21, 2011

Some 950 light-years away, a team, including EAPS Sara Seager, finds smallest exoplanets yet detected.

The Scientist Who Loved the Cold

December 19, 2011

In this video MIT-WHOI Joint Program grad. student Alison Criscitiello shares her thoughts about the work/life intersections that come from her love of all things cold.

Sara Seager named AAAS fellow

December 16, 2011

Seager's award comes in recognition of her pioneering work on theoretical models of the atmospheric composition and internal structure of extrasolar planets, from super-Earths to gas-giant planets.

Robert van der Hilst named head of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences

December 12, 2011

Robert van der Hilst, the Schlumberger Professor of Earth Sciences in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), has been named the new head of EAPS, effective Jan. 1, 2012.

Taylor Perron gives Sharp Lecture at AGU

December 9, 2011

Taylor Perron received the Luna B. Leopold Young Scientist Award from the Focus Group on Earth and Planetary Surface Processes, and delivered its Robert Sharp Lecture this year.

Near-Earth asteroid 2005 YU55 flyby

December 9, 2011

Watch a time-lapse video of asteroid 2005 YU55 as it passed by last month as seen from MIT's Wallace Observatory in Westford, MA. 2005 YU55 has a diameter of about 400 m and on this occasion passed within ~325, 000 km of the Earth.

Meet Yodit Tewelde - EAPS Graduate Student

December 5, 2011

Yodit Tewelde is a graduate student in the Planetary Science Program in EAPS.

Debating at the Federal Reserve Bank

December 2, 2011

Kudos to grad students Alex Evans, Yodit Tewelde, and Mike Sori who took time out to help high school students in the Boston Debate League last week.

Tracking an Elusive Chemical - Estrogens

December 2, 2011

PAOC graduate student Dave Griffith studies the impacts these hormones might have in the coastal ocean.

Terrascope freshmen present plan to reduce global diversity loss

November 30, 2011

Freshmen in the Terrascope subject Mission 2015 (also known as "Solving Complex Problems") have spent the fall semester studying the problem of what to do about disappearing global biodiversity.

The Ocean's Tiny Chemists

November 23, 2011

Kim Popendorf is a graduate student in the MIT-WHOI Joint Program with an interest in marine biogeochemical cycles. Her advisor is Ben Van Mooy.

Letter from the Head of Department - Fall 2011

November 23, 2011

New Faculty

November 23, 2011

EAPS has two new members of faculty. Atmospheric chemist, Professor Dan Cziczo (pronounced Cit-so) and planetary scientist Professor Kerri Cahoy.

Seismic Imaging at ERL

November 23, 2011

EAPS is an important contributor to MIT's energy and environmental initiatives, and our Earth Resources Laboratory (ERL) serves as the center for sub-surface science. ERL Director Rob van der Hilst describes current research and how the ERL brings together scientists and engineers from across MIT to study sub-surface reservoirs.

Toksöz Fellowship Fund.

November 23, 2011

The oil crisis of the 1970’s brought home to Professor M. Nafi Toksöz the importance of growing global energy demand and the energy security of the United States.

Beyond the Dark Side of the Moon

November 23, 2011

In October 1959 the Soviet Luna 3 satellite beamed back the first ever images of the dark side of the moon. Fifty-two years later a NASA satellite mission, launched on September 10th, 2011, aims to provide scientists with the first comprehensive images of the inside of the moon.

Blogging Darjeeling

November 19, 2011

Follow grad. student Anita Ganesan's blog. Anita, a grad. student in the Prinn Group, is currently in Darjeeling, India installing the instrument she has built to measure long-lived greenhouse gases.

Timeline of a Mass Extinction

November 18, 2011

Sam Bowring and Dan Rothman have identified a new timescale that may help scientists home in on the end-Permian extinction’s likely causes.

The First Hairy Microbes

November 16, 2011

Geologist Tanja Bosak and co-workers at MIT and Harvard have unearthed remains that are more than 100 million years older than any previously identified ciliate fossils, suggesting early life on Earth may have been more complex than previously thought.

Postcard from Darjeeling

November 16, 2011

Grad. students Laura Meredith and Anita Ganesan are currently in Darjeeling, India, deploying Anita's gas chromatograph.

The Mercury Game

November 15, 2011

Find out how a game, co-developed by Noelle Selin, can teach people about the role of science in international environmental policy making.

Between the beach and the deep blue sea

November 13, 2011

Physical oceanography grad. student Rachel Horwitz describes her work exploring the dynamic gateway of the shallow inner shelf. Rachel is a member of the MIT-WHOI Joint Program.

Spring greening

November 4, 2011

Raf Ferrari and former postdoc. John Taylor report identifying a physical explanation for why phytoplankton blooms explode along ocean fronts.

Battered asteroid may have warm core

October 31, 2011

According to associate professor Ben Weiss, co-author of two recent Science papers about asteroid 21 Lutetia, "The asteroid belt may be more interesting than it seems on the surface".

Inaugural Carlson Lecture

October 26, 2011

If you missed October's Lorenz Center sponsored inaugural Carlson lecture, here is a recording of Paul Hoffman's talk "Earth's Surprising Climate History".

Royden awarded 2011 GSA Woollard Award

October 10, 2011

Prof. Leigh (Wiki) H. Royden has been selected as the 2011 George P. Woollard Awardee by the Geophysics Division for her "major contributions to the study of geologic processes through quantitative geophysical modeling".

TESS project awarded $1 million NASA grant

October 4, 2011

Sara Seager of MIT's TESS team named by NASA as one of 11 proposals recently accepted for evaluation as potential future science missions.

Spitzer finds steaming super-Earth

September 27, 2011

Research by postdoc Brice-Olivier Demory (Seager Group) provides surprising new details about a supersized and superheated version of Earth called 55 Cancri e.

Lorenz Center gets an online home

September 26, 2011

The Lorenz Center at MIT, founded by PAOC's Dan Rothman and Kerry Emanuel, is devoted to learning how climate works. Named after the late MIT meteorologist Edward N. Lorenz, a pioneer of chaos theory, the Center fosters creative approaches to increasing fundamental understanding. At the new website you can read about the new Center's goals and aspirations, its origins, as well as the people involved.

Zuber testifies

September 22, 2011

Prof. Maria Zuber, EAPS Department Head, testified before the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee on September 22 on the goals and priorities for the future of human spaceflight.

David McGee to join the Program in Atmospheres, Oceans and Climate faculty

September 13, 2011

McGee is a paleoclimatologist who has focused on reconstructing past changes in extratropical atmospheric circulation and hydrology.

Ferrari awarded Breene

September 13, 2011

Marking 9-11

September 12, 2011

GRAIL on its way.

September 11, 2011

On Saturday, Sept. 11, 2011 at 9:08:52, GRAIL (Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory) was boosted by a Delta II rocket on it's way to the moon.

DEAPS Extreme Weather and Climate 2011

September 9, 2011

Earthquakes, hurricanes, plummeting watermelons, DEAPS Extreme Weather and Climate 2011 had it all.

Susan Solomon to join the Program in Atmospheres, Oceans and Climate faculty

September 9, 2011

PAOC is delighted to announce that Susan Solomon will join the EAPS faculty as Professor of Atmospheric Chemistry and Climate Science effective January 1, 2012.

To the Moon

September 8, 2011

Maria Zuber becomes the first woman to lead a planetary spacecraft mission. Saturday’s launch of NASA’s Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) twin spacecraft, a carefully choreographed mission to precisely map the moon’s gravitational field, could help scientists understand fundamental questions about the moon’s composition, internal structure and evolution.

A new way to model urban air pollution

August 30, 2011

Urban regions account for an ever increasing fraction of Earth’s population, and are consequently an ever increasing source of air pollutants. These pollutants include anthropogenic aerosols, which have important climate and health implications. But modeling aerosol emissions from urban areas is difficult due to the detailed temporal and spatial scales required. Thus, urban areas significantly contribute to the overall uncertainty and variability in global atmospheric model predictions of aerosol and pollutant distribution. To address these uncertainties, researchers from the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change set out to see if they could better model aerosol emissions and distribution from urban regions.

Breathing new life into Earth

August 16, 2011

New research suggests O₂ may have been made on Earth hundreds of millions of years before its debut in the atmosphere, keeping a low profile in "oxygen oases" in the oceans. Waldbauer, Newman and Summons have found evidence that tiny aerobic organisms may have evolved to survive on extremely low levels of the gas in these undersea oases.

On Thin Ice.

August 10, 2011

According to Postdoc. Pierre Rampal and co-authors the most recent global climate report fails to capture the reality of the changing Arctic seascape.

Putting the pieces together

August 8, 2011

Tom Herring among MIT researchers to reconstruct Baja California’s 2010 ‘Easter Earthquake.’

To an asteroid, and back

July 26, 2011

In a class being co-taught by Sara Seager, Kerri Cahoy, and others, students will have the "rare opportunity to get their hands dirty building space-ready hardware". "It's a chance to sample the original chemistry of everything that makes the Earth, and us," says Richard Binzel, an advisor to the student project.

3 Questions: The Next Mars rover destination

July 25, 2011

Maria Zuber says Gale Crater may reveal clues about Mars' past. In this "3 Questions" interview she speaks with MIT News about a future in which humans might explore the Red Planet.

Bosak wins 2011 AGU Macelwane Award

July 20, 2011

Assistant Professor of Geology, Geochemistry, and Geobiology, Tanja Bosak has been awarded a James B. Macelwane Medal in recognition of "significant contributions to the geophysical sciences by an outstanding young scientist".

Stellar eclipse gives glimpse of exoplanet

July 19, 2011

Using spectral data from a transit of 55 Cancri e, postdoc Brice-Olivier Demorey and Prof. Sara Seager have been able to establish the exoplanets dimensions.

The tallest tree in the land

July 18, 2011

Knowing how tall trees can grow in any given region can give ecologists a wealth of information, from the potential density of a forest and size of its tree canopy to the amount of carbon stored in woodlands and the overall health of an ecosystem. Now grad student Chris Kempes (Follows' Group), along with colleagues at the University of Maryland and the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico, has come up with a simple model to predict the maximum tree height in different environments across the United States.

Meet Planetary Scientist Prof. Kerri Cahoy.

July 1, 2011

Cahoy joins EAPS this July as an Assistant Professor in the Planetary Sciences Program. Prof. Cahoy uses spacecraft radio systems to study the atmospheres and ionospheres of solar system planets.

Introducing Atmospheric Chemist Prof. Dan Cziczo.

July 1, 2011

Dan Cziczo is an atmospheric scientist interested in the interrelationship of particulate matter and cloud formation. He comes to EAPS from PNNL where he has been a Senior Scientist in the Atmospheric Science and Global Change Division and Director of the Atmospheric Measurement Lab in the Fundamental Science Directorate since 2007.

3 Questions: Richard Binzel on near-Earth asteroids

June 27, 2011

Planetary scientist Rick Binzel, speaks to MIT News in this "3 Questions" article. '2011 MD,' found by a Lincoln Lab team, will pass close to the planet on Monday.

Life after Snowball Earth

June 15, 2011

The first organisms to emerge after an ancient worldwide glaciation likely evolved hardy survival skills, arming themselves with tough exteriors to weather a frozen climate. EAPS' Tanja Bosak and co-workers have discovered hundreds of microscopic fossils in rocks dating back nearly 710 million years, around the time when the planet emerged from a global glaciation, or “Snowball Earth,” event.

Ancient armor

June 7, 2011

In summer 2007, two geologists armed with rock hammers and a shotgun hiked through the Yukon, looking for fossils. For two weeks, postdoc. Phoebe Cohen and Francis Macdonald, an assistant professor of geology at Harvard University, set up camp along the Alaska-Canada border in a remote mountain range accessible only via helicopter.

Degrees awarded.

June 6, 2011

Degrees awarded during the 2010/2011 academic year. Degrees are conferred in September, February and June.

The price of fresh air

June 6, 2011

China has experienced unprecedented development over the past three decades, but this growth has come at a substantial cost to the country’s environment and public health. China is notorious for extremely high levels of air pollution. As the country faces continuous environmental challenges that mirror its continuing development, there is a need to measure the health impacts of air pollution. Read this MIT News article about a recent study released by the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change quantifying the damage to the Chinese economy caused by a lack of air-quality control measures between 1975 and 2005. The study is co-authored by Noelle Selin.

Commencement 2011

June 6, 2011

On Friday, June 3, immediately after Commencement, EAPS hosted a reception for new graduates and alumni in the Ida Green Lounge.

Hotspot in the hot seat

May 27, 2011

Using a new imaging technique adapted from uses in oil and gas exploration, EAPS' Robert van der Hilst and colleagues have produced high-resolution images that peek hundreds of kilometers below the Earth’s surface. Doing so, they found a hotspot — but not where many scientists had thought it would be. Instead, the MIT team found evidence of hot mantle activity some 600 kilometers deep and 2,000 kilometers wide, in an area far west of the “Big Island” of Hawaii.

2011 Student Awards

May 16, 2011

A roll-call of this year's Excellence in Teaching, Crosby, Goetze and Rossby award recipients.

Science and policy can catalyze each other, EPA head says

April 22, 2011

During her visit to MIT to give this year's Kendal Lecture, EPA Head Lisa Jackson discussed how technology can affect government regulations.

Hager awarded 2011 Augustus Love Medal

April 8, 2011

Brad Hager has been awarded the Augustus Love Medal at the 2011 meeting of the European Geosciences Union.

Cold asteroids may have a soft heart

April 8, 2011

Partially molten small bodies may be abundant in space, and may have given the Earth its oceans.

Are you a Martian?

March 23, 2011

We all could be, scientists say — and an MIT-developed instrument might someday provide the proof. Research scientist Christopher Carr and postdoctoral associate Clarissa Lui, working with Maria Zuber and Gary Ruvkun, a molecular biologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University, came up with the instrument concept and put together the initial team.

Seeing through the cracks

March 23, 2011

In the wake of Japan’s largest earthquake, MIT scientists look for geological clues to explain its devastating magnitude - EAPS' Brad Hager speaks to MIT News.

Nautical night at the MIT Museum

March 11, 2011

Weather-in-a-Tank participates in the 75th anniversary of the MIT Nautical Association event.

Reading Earth's magnetic history

March 4, 2011

Ben Weiss talks to MIT News about a new tool which allows unprecedented accuracy in dating of some seafloor rocks, with potential to help climate analysis.

Just another asteroid hurtling towards Earth....

February 27, 2011

Hollywood hype aside, close encounters of a rocky kind are fairly common. But they’re fascinating to local scientists who want to learn how it all began, and maybe fend off armageddon. Postdoc Francesca DeMeo and Professor Rick Binzel in the Boston Globe