Longreads

Deep below the ocean surface, the light fades into a twilight zone where whales and fish migrate and dead algae and zooplankton rain down from above. This is the heart of the ocean’s carbon pump, part of the natural ocean processes that capture about a third of all human-produced carbon dioxide and sink it into the deep sea, where it remains for hundreds of years. There may be ways to enhance these processes so the ocean pulls more carbon out of the atmosphere to help slow climate change. Yet little is known about the consequences. Peter de Menocal, a marine paleoclimatologist and director of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, discussed ocean carbon dioxide removal at a recent TEDxBoston: Planetary Stewardship event. In this interview, he dives deeper into the risks and benefits of human intervention and describes an ambitious plan to build a vast monitoring network of autonomous sensors in the ocean to help humanity understand the impact. First, what is ocean carbon...

As a hurricane intensifies, hurricane hunters are in the sky doing something almost unimaginable: flying through the center of the storm. With each pass, the scientists aboard these planes take measurements that satellites can’t and send them to forecasters at the National Hurricane Center. Jason Dunion, a University of Miami meteorologist, has led hurricane field programs for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. He described the technology the team uses to gauge hurricane behavior in real time and the experience aboard a P-3 Orion as it plunges through the eyewall of a hurricane. What happens aboard a hurricane hunter when you fly into a storm? Basically, we’re take a flying laboratory into the heart of the hurricane, all the way up to Category 5s. While we’re flying, we’re crunching data and sending it to forecasters and climate modelers. In the P-3s, we routinely cut through the middle of the storm, right into the eye. Picture an X p...