Featured series 
Tag: Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
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Science & Tech
Looking for the meaning of life at the bottom of the sea
Charles Langmuir, Harvard professor of geochemistry, loves going to sea. “It’s tremendously stimulating, wonderful, exciting, and eye-opening,” he says enthusiastically. “Every time I’ve gone since 1984, I’ve seen things I’ve…
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Science & Tech
McElroy says it’s time to stop seeing global warming as political issue
Michael B. McElroy, Gilbert Butler Professor of Environmental Studies and director of Harvard’s Center for the Environment, is among the scientists who since the 1970s have been using paleoclimatic data…
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Campus & Community
Earth’s new center
The outer core is liquid, the inner core is solid. That’s the way Earth has been depicted in textbooks for the past 66 years. But the work of Adam Dziewonski,…
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Science & Tech
New earthquake mapping system could save lives
“The earthquake-hazard maps currently in use are based on the premise that the closer a building is to a large fault, the better designed it should be,” says Harvard earthquake…
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Science & Tech
Atmospheric chemists fly high and low for novel carbon dioxide measurements
Political leaders throughout the world have taken notice of the increasing levels of carbon in the atmosphere and have begun negotiations on how to mitigate “greenhouse” gases through accords such…
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Science & Tech
Polar bear research shows global warming is real
Harvard Professor James McCarthy was among a handful of top scientists who coordinated a remarkable report by the world scientific community in 2001 that said global warming is real, it’s…
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Science & Tech
What killed the dinosaurs?
Charles Marshall’s childhood passion led him to a career in paleontology, trying to understand the interplay between inheritance, environment, and catastrophe in directing evolution. Marshall’s work attracted media attention in…
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Science & Tech
El Nino found to be 124,000 years old
Records preserved in corals from Indonesia reveal that El Niño was causing severe weather even before the last ice age began, when the climate apparently was like it was for…
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Science & Tech
Discovering a new earthquake fault under Los Angeles
“Los Angeles is caught in a vise,” says John Shaw, an associate professor of structural and economic geology at Harvard who was half of a research team that discovered a…