Climate and atmosphere
Past climate shifts, cloud feedbacks, atmospheric mixing and the future of ice sheets.
7 problemsClimate and atmosphere
The physical processes shaping clouds, weather, and climate.
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Browse collectionsEarth history
Missing rock, rising oxygen, abrupt warming and a changing Mediterranean: reconstruct Earth’s past from traces it left behind.
6 problemsA few problems to explore
8 totalAtmospheric turbulence
Air contains interacting eddies over an enormous range of sizes. How can their combined effect on heat, momentum, and pollutants be predicted reliably?
Aerosol–cloud interactions
Airborne particles change how clouds form and reflect sunlight. How much cooling do those changes produce, across different clouds and weather conditions?
Lightning initiation
How does fast electrical breakdown become a lightning leader in natural thunderstorm fields?
Low-cloud climate feedback
How will low clouds change under sustained warming, and how will that change affect Earth’s energy balance?
Marine ice-cliff instability
A tall Antarctic ice cliff could break up faster than ice flows forward. Whether this can sustain accelerating retreat depends on competing deformation and failure processes.
Mid-Pleistocene transition
Why did the dominant rhythm of ice ages change about a million years ago?