Environment

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) is at a crossroads. Recent long-term studies of the area indicate that rising temperatures and evaporation rates will likely further deplete scarce water resources critical to meeting the nation’s agricultural, industrial, and domestic needs; more extreme flooding events could endanger lives, economic vitality, and infrastructure; and a combination of increasing heat and humidity levels may ultimately render the kingdom uninhabitable. Facing a foreboding future, how might the nation adapt to changing climatic conditions and become more resilient to climate extremes?
Due to the KSA’s distinctive natural and artificial features, from coastal landscapes to river beds to agricultural areas, decision-makers seeking to design actionable plans for regional and local adaptation and resilience will require projections of the KSA’s mean climate and extreme events at a higher spatial resolution than what previous studies have produced.     
To that end, a team of researchers from the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change and the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology’s Center for Complex Engineering Systems used a high-resolution, regional climate modeling approach to generate mid-21st century (2041–2050) projections under a high-emissions, high-climate-impact scenario. The climate projections carry an unprecedented four-kilometer horizontal resolution and cover the entire KSA, and focus exclusively on the months of August and November. During these months, which represent, respectively, the KSA’s dry-hot and wet seasons, extreme events have been observed more frequently.
Applying this modeling approach, the team projected increasing temperatures by mid-century across the KSA, including five strategic locations — the capital city of Riyadh, religious tourism destinations Makkah and Madinah, the designated future tourist site of Tabuk, and the port city of Jeddah — in both August and November, and a rising August heat index (high heat and humidity) that particularly threatens regional habitability in Jeddah due to an increasing frequency of extreme heat index days.
The researchers also found an increase in the intensity and frequency of precipitation events in August by mid-century, particularly along the nation’s mountainous western coast, suggesting a potential for water harvesting — that could replenish local aquifers and supplement water supplies elsewhere — as a regional climate adaptation strategy to avert future water scarcity. The projections also showed a significant decline in precipitation rates in a sizeable stretch of desert extending from the southern portion of the country known as the Empty Quarter. 
The study appears in the journal Atmosphere.
“The intent of our research was to highlight the potential use of our modeling approach not only to generate high-resolution climate projections that capture the effects of unique local spatial features, but also to enable local solutions for climate adaption and resilience in the region,” says Muge Komurcu, the study’s lead author and a research scientist at the MIT Joint Program.  
The study was funded by MIT and the Center for Complex Engineering Systems at the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology. More

Under its Plan for Action on Climate Change, MIT has a goal of reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 32 percent below its 2014 emission levels, by 2030. Those reductions are now at 24 percent, and the Institute is track to meet or exceed the goal, said Joe Higgins, vice president for campus services and stewardship, thanks to Institute-wide efforts that benefit from connecting research and operations.
In the fifth of six symposia in the Climate Action series, held Oct. 20, an online panel of MIT experts including Higgins discussed the role of research universities in tackling climate change. Research universities like MIT provide critical technology and policy innovations, the speakers said, but can also act as role models for other institutions.
“Higher education has a responsibility, an opportunity to set their sights on being an exemplar organization and community in how to face, respond to, and address the climate change issue,” said Professor Paula Hammond, head of the Department of Chemical Engineering and a co-chair of the symposium.
The 170 acres of the MIT campus and its affiliate programs are a kind of living laboratory and testbed for climate solutions, “to demonstrate the technology and the choices that we as people make to move the campus forward,” said Krystyn Van Vliet, associate provost and professor of materials science and engineering and of biological engineering.
In one effort to connect research and operations, Higgins and his colleagues asked participants at the 2018 MIT Energy Hack to find ways of using machine learning to reduce emissions in large buildings. The MIT Sustainability DataPool, a portal of campus sustainability data open to the MIT community, is another way the Institute encourages its researchers “to use the campus as a testbed to generate game-changing solutions” to climate challenges, said Julie Newman, director of sustainability and lecturer in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning.
Having this model in place was a tremendous help when the Covid-19 pandemic created a new influx of personal protective equipment (PPE) and single-use plastic items to manage within the campus’ consumption and waste sustainability plan, said Newman, also a symposium co-chair. “When all of a sudden the challenge of Covid comes and we notice that we’re going to have to grapple with supply chain and use and disposal of PPE, it didn’t take but a couple of weeks to reach out and pull together a research team, an operations team, a finance team, and say let’s study this in MIT style.”
Research universities must be a source of innovations to address global climate change, said Associate Provost Richard Lester, “because our existing government-led innovation system is falling short, even relative to the inadequate benchmarks set by governments themselves.”
Among the efforts to encourage these innovations is MIT Climate Grand Challenges, a program launched in July 2020 that encourages all MIT researchers to develop and implement climate mitigation and adaptation solutions. The program already has received more than 100 letters of interest from more 300 faculty and senior researchers, Lester said.
Technological breakthroughs are still needed urgently to stop the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, despite the talk among some experts that the technological solutions are already available, said Maria Zuber, MIT vice president for research and the E.A. Griswold Professor of Geophysics.
“I wish these individuals who think we have the technology were right. But they’re not. We do not currently have the technology we need to rapidly and adequately make the needed energy transition,” Zuber said. “This is why our work at MIT matters so much.”
Climate solutions must include more than just advanced science and technology capabilities, said Melissa Nobles, the Kenan Sahin Dean of the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, and professor of political science. At MIT, she notes, classes on the ethics of climate change, the J-PAL King Climate Action Initiative, and Charlotte Brathwaite’s “Bee Boy” theater project are some examples of how the social sciences and arts can be brought to bear on climate issues.
“As I see it, the more that research institutions can invent practical ways for these various forms of knowledge to intersect, blend, and become mutually informing, the more quickly we can generate effective climate solutions,” Nobles said.
At the same time, universities should remember that climate change policy is only one of several issues, including global health, poverty, and racism, “which deserve and command our attention,” said Institute Professor Emeritus John Deutch. He also sounded a note of caution about how universities should engage in policy discussions. “They cannot speak out with one voice, or should do so very rarely,” he said, because members of the university community often hold diverse opinions and points of view.
The final symposium in the series, “What is the World Waiting For? Policies to Fight Climate Change” will take place online Nov. 16. More

We have all faced new and greater challenges this year. The Covid-19 pandemic has spared no country, family, or individual, but it has not impacted us all equally. It is those most disadvantaged and most underserved who have been hit the hardest. The team at MIT Solve felt an immediate responsibility to use its work and privilege to take action in this historic moment, to mobilize its community to address the problems aggravated by the pandemic. The Solve Global Challenges that had launched in February 2020 suddenly became all the more pressing. And, for the first time in its history, Solve launched a rapid-response Challenge on Health Security and Pandemics on March 5. 
Then, something amazing happened: Solve received over 2,600 solutions from 135 countries — an 86 percent increase in applications year-over-year. It is no coincidence that, in this year of great upheaval and disruption, problem-solvers around the world leaped to the call. It tells an inspiring and hopeful story about our ability as human beings to see an opportunity, and fix challenges.
Solve Challenge Finals was a celebration of that spirit. Of all those submissions, the Solve team showcased the solutions that its judges selected as the most promising, inventive, and impactful from all around the world. While it’s hard to beat the energy that comes from meeting in person, one silver lining of coming together virtually was that all of the finalists were able to attend without the extra stress of visas, plane tickets, and jet lag. 
Some 90 finalists from across the world spoke on solutions like Biometrics for Vaccine Delivery, which uses contactless biometrics to ensure vaccines reach every intended beneficiary at the frontline in Africa and Asia; ShockTalk, a telebehavioral app for Indigenous users, made more crucial by the rise of mental health struggles in the pandemic; and The Last Mile, which provides in-prison tech education and post-incarceration mentorship to combat the problem of recidivism in the U.S. Ultimately, Solve’s expert judges selected 35 new Solver teams — including Yiya AirScience, co-founded by Erin Fitzgerald ’09, which provides rural African girls access to interactive learning experiences through simple keypad phones — and eight new Indigenous Communities Fellows.
Sal Khan ’98, MNG ’98, who has singularly shaped remote learning, joined the proceedings from the very closet where he founded Khan Academy. Speaking with NPR’s Anya Kamanetz, he shared insights from his own entrepreneurial journey and advised aspiring innovators that one secret to success is “to always have a side project.” After all, Khan Academy first started out as Khan’s post-work passion project.
One of the Indigenous Communities finalists stressed the importance of community in powering innovation: “It takes a community, it takes a community, it takes a community! It is necessary for our people and for our earth to be able to connect together. It starts in this kind of competition — to be able to look each other in the eye and say let’s go. And how far can we go? Endless possibilities!” This was the energizing message of Tiana Henderson, founder of Hale Unfolded.
Two speakers spoke to the cultural moment we are in today. Phillip Atiba Goff, co-founder and CEO of the Center for Policing Equity, emphasized that in order to truly solve a problem, we must first correctly diagnose it. He shared this crucial message when discussing the Breonna Taylor tragedy, and how racism in policing is just one symptom of broader racism in society. Goff called on finalists to dig deeply into the issues they are trying to solve. He remarked: “As technologists and problem-solvers, if we fail to diagnose the problem correctly, we will build a suite of tech toys instead of tools. If we get the diagnosis wrong, the set of solutions we build will be entirely unable to speak to the scale of the problem. In the context of policing, if we don’t recognize that it is part of a broader issue and not the issue itself, we are going to be creating tools that are too small to make a difference.”
Artist and gender liberation activist Madame Gandhi delivered two powerful musical performances and a message of defiance: “I don’t want our identity to be defined by how oppressed we are.” She called for more voices like hers in the music industry. With only 2 percent of music producers identifying as women, the narrative in too much of the music we consume is still perpetuating myths that hold us back. “I — like many of you — am here to design and provide the alternative.”  
Speakers including Harry Moseley, Global CIO of Zoom, also discussed the pivot to remote work and schooling resulting from this pandemic, and how to  find opportunities for greater inclusion as we reshape the status quo we’ve taken for granted for so long.
MIT Solve will work closely with its newly selected Solver teams to scale their work and impact across all of the 2020 Challenges. More

Renowned atmospheric chemist and MIT Institute Professor Emeritus Mario Molina, who discovered that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) had the potential to destroy the ozone layer in the Earth’s stratosphere, has died at the age of 77.
At MIT, Molina held joint appointments in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS) and the Department of Chemistry, from 1989 to 2004.
In the early 1970s, Molina demonstrated through computer modeling and laboratory work that compounds widely used in propellants and refrigerants could destroy ozone in the upper atmosphere, increasing the ultraviolet radiation reaching Earth. His theories were later confirmed by observation and helped support the ratification of the Montreal Protocol, the first global treaty to reduce CFC emissions.
In 1995, he shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry with F. Sherwood Rowland of the University of California at Irvine, and Paul Crutzen, a scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, for discovering the depletion of the Earth’s thin, protective layer of ozone, which the Nobel committee referred to as the “Achilles heel of the universe.” Molina continued to advocate for environmental causes throughout his career.
“Mario Molina was the gentle giant of his age in environmental science, a wise mentor to his students, and respectful of others no matter their rank or status,” says Ronald Prinn, the TEPCO Professor of Atmospheric Science in EAPS, who led the search committee that originally brought Molina to MIT. “We are privileged to have had him on the faculty at MIT for 15 years, during the middle of which he was awarded the Nobel Prize, and from the proceeds of which he established the Molina Fellowships at MIT. His work on mitigating depletion of the ozone layer and air pollution in megacities is legendary. Most recently he founded the Centro Mario Molina devoted to the transition from fossil energy to clean energy in Mexico and beyond. He will be sorely missed, but never forgotten.”
Early scientific inquiry
Born on March 19, 1943 in Mexico City, Molina was enthralled by science from a young age. He used toy microscopes and chemistry sets to create his own “lab” in the bathroom of his childhood home. His aunt, a chemist, supported these early scientific interests by helping him conduct experiments more advanced than amateur chemistry sets would allow.
He attended school in Mexico City; later, his parents sent him abroad to the Institute Rosenberg in Switzerland, hoping to support his scientific proclivity. Molina attended the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), where he completed his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in 1965, followed by a postgraduate degree in polymerization kinetics from the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg, West Germany, in 1967. The University of California at Berkeley awarded him a PhD in physical chemistry in 1972.
Environmental reactions
In 1973, Molina began his CFC research as a postdoc at the University of California at Irvine, in the lab of F. Sherwood Rowland, who initially presented Molina with a list of research options. Molina latched quickly to one in particular: tracking the environmental fate of CFCs, the industrial chemicals that had been building up in the atmosphere and at the time were thought to have no adverse effects on the environment.
After simulating the chemicals’ reaction behavior and kinetics, Molina found that there was not much that could break down CFCs in the lower atmosphere. He suspected, however, that CFCs could be detrimental at higher altitudes, and hypothesized that high-energy photons from the sun available within the stratosphere could break the chemicals apart, generating free chlorine ions that would then react destructively with ozone molecules. Rowland and Molina published their work in the journal Nature in 1974.
That year, Molina and Rowland publicly called for a ban on CFCs at the American Chemical Society meeting. Molina also began teaching atmospheric science, holding positions at UC Irvine from 1975 to 1982 and conducting research at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory from 1982 to 1989. Initially disputed by industry, Molina’s work began to gain traction, first when it was reviewed by the National Academy of Sciences in 1976, and then even more so when a hole in the Antarctic ozone later was first reported in 1985.
In 1987, his work, in part, inspired atmospheric chemist Susan Solomon to lead a scientific expedition to Antarctica, the results of which proved that the ozone hole was indeed caused by CFCs. The Montreal Protocol to phase out CFCs went into effect in 1989, the same year that Molina joined the faculty at MIT.
Molina was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with his colleagues for their work on CFCs and ozone depletion — the first time the Swedish Academy recognized environmental degradation from human-made substances. Molina donated a substantial portion of his share of the prize money to MIT in 1996 to create a fellowship program for scientists from developing countries to pursue environmental research.
“It’s clear to me that one of the important needs for global environment issues is the participation of scientists from all over the world,” Molina said in announcing the gift. “We have some very big challenges ahead if we are to preserve the environment, and it’s obvious that there are too few scientists from developing countries involved in the effort.”
Molina continued his work in atmospheric chemistry while at MIT, studying the atmosphere-biosphere interface, hoping to better understand global climate change.
“The signature feature of Mario Molina was that he was not only a great scientist and scholar, he was also a true gentlemen — always ready with a smile and focused on the person he was speaking with, whether it was an undergraduate student or a fellow Nobel laureate,” says Solomon, who is the Lee and Geraldine Martin Professor of Environmental Studies in EAPS and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Chemistry.
“His humanity and his science”
In 1994 Molina was named by U.S. President Bill Clinton to serve on the 18-member President’s Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST). Later, he also served on President Barack Obama’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in 2011, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama in 2016.
MIT appointed him an Institute Professor for his abilities as a “natural educator” and excellence in research in 1997.
Molina often traveled to Mexico to work on environmental projects. While at MIT, he collaborated with policymakers and researchers to reduce Mexico City’s severe air pollution and improve air quality. In 2004, he founded the Mario Molina Center for Strategic Studies in Energy and the Environment in Mexico City, an organization dedicated to bridging “practical solutions between science and public policy on energy and environment matters to promote sustainable development and vigorous economic growth.” That same year, he left MIT to join the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at University of California at San Diego. In 2017, he was inducted into the California Hall of Fame.
“Mario Molina is unique in his ability to span from fundamental science to local and global policy for stewarding our environment. He towers in his humanity as well as his science,” said MIT President Charles M. Vest on Molina’s departure.
Molina was awarded numerous honorary degrees from institutions including Harvard University, Duke University, and Yale University, as well as institutions in Mexico. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1993, the United States Institute of Medicine in 1996, and The National College of Mexico in 2003. He was a member of the Mexican Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and served on numerous advisory councils, including the National Science Foundation’s Advisory Committee for Geosciences.
In addition to his Nobel Prize, Molina received the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, the UNEP-Sasakawa Environment Prize, and the United Nations Champion of the Earth Award. He was bestowed the Knight Medal of the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Hollande in 2014. He was awarded the Esselen Award of the Northeast section of the American Chemical Society in 1987, the Newcomb-Cleveland Prize from AAAS in 1988, as well as the NASA Medal for Exceptional Scientific Advancement and the United Nations Environmental Programme Global 500 Award in 1989.
Additionally, the Pew Charitable Trusts Scholars Program in Conservation and the Environment honored him as a leading environmental scientist in 1990. Molina was given the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement in 1996. He won the Willard Gibbs Award from the Chicago Section of the American Chemical Society and the American Chemical Society Prize for Creative Advances in Environment Technology and Science in 1998. He was granted the 9th Annual Heinz Award in the Environment. He also had an asteroid named after him: 9680 Molina.
Molina is survived by his wife, Guadalupe Álvarez; his son, Felipe Jose Molina; and three stepsons, Joshua, Allan, and Asher Ginsburg. He was previously married to atmospheric chemist Luisa Tan Molina, an EAPS research affiliate. More

Although we can’t see it in action, the Earth is constantly churning out new land. This takes place at subduction zones, where tectonic plates crush against each other and in the process plow up chains of volcanos that magma can rise through. Some of this magma does not spew out, but instead mixes and morphs just below the surface. It then crystallizes as new continental crust, in the form of a mountain range.
Scientists have thought that the Earth’s mountain ranges are formed through this process over many millions of years. But MIT geologists have now found that the planet can generate new land far more quickly than previously thought.
In a paper published in the journal Geology, the team shows that parts of the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California rose up surprisingly fast, over a period of just 1.39 million years — more than twice as fast as expected for the region. The researchers attribute the rapid formation of land to a massive flare-up of magma.
“The really exciting thing about our findings is, with new high-precision geochronology, we were able to date how quickly that crust-building process happened, and we showed that this large volume of new crust was emplaced at an extremely rapid rate,” says the study’s lead author Benjamin Klein PhD ’19, who carried out the research as a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). “It was sort of an instant. It was a little over 1 million years, but in geologic times, it was super fast.”
Klein’s co-authors are Associate Professor Oliver Jagoutz and Research Scientist Jahandar Ramezani, both in EAPS.
A complete cross-section
The Sierra Nevada mountain range is a product of the collision of two tectonic plates: the westward-moving North American Plate and what at the time was the Farallon Plate, which ground slowly under the North American Plate, eventually sliding entirely into the Earth’s mantle.
Around 100 million years ago, as both plates collided, they created first a chain of volcanos, then a towering mountain range that is today the Sierra Nevada.
“What is today the West Coast of the United States probably looked, back then, like the Andes today, with high elevations and a chain of large volcanos,” Klein says.
For their study, the researchers concentrated on a geologic feature in the Sierra Nevada known as an intrusive suite — a large volume of rock that originally formed deep in the Earth’s interior. Once crystallized, the rocks form a new, vertical column of continental crust.
They focused in particular on the Bear Valley Intrusive Suite, a unique formation in that it represents the vestiges of new continental crust that is today exposed on the surface, as a 40-mile stretch of granite. These rocks, which today lie horizontally along the mountain range, originally formed as a vertical column. Over time, this tower of new continental crust eroded, stretching and tilting into its current horizontal configuration.
“The Bear Valley Intrusive Suite gives us a complete cross-section of what these magma plumbing systems underlying large volcanos looked like, where normally we would have a limited snapshot,” Klein says. “That allows us to think much more completely about how quickly new crust was being built.”
A speed limit for new crust
The team collected rock samples across a region of the Sierra Nevada Batholith and brought them back to MIT to analyze their composition. They were able to determine the age of nine samples, using uranium-lead geochronology, a high-precision dating technique pioneered by the late MIT Professor Emeritus Sam Bowring. From each sample, the researchers isolated individual grains of zircon, a common mineral in rocks that contains uranium and some lead, the ratio of which scientists can measure to get an estimate of the rock’s age.
From their analyses, Klein and his colleagues discovered that the age of all nine samples spanned a surprisingly short range, of just 1.39 million years. The team calculated an estimate for the amount of magma that must have crystallized to form the new crust that the samples represent. They found that about 250 cubic kilometers of magma likely rose up from Earth’s interior and transformed into new crust — in just 1.39 million years.
“That’s about two-and-a-half times faster than previous estimates for crust formation in the Sierras, which is a pretty big difference,” Klein says. “It gives us a maximum speed limit for how quickly these things can actually happen.”
Klein says that given the speed of this new crust formation, the likely cause was a magma flareup, or sudden burst of magmatic activity.
“The entire batholith was constructed in almost 200 million years, but we know over that period of time, there were periods when it was highly active and periods that were quieter, with less new material added,” Klein says. “What we were able to show in this area was that, at least locally, the rate at which magma was brought in is much faster than the average rates that have been documented in the Sierras.”
Geologists have thought that magma flare-ups occur as a result of unusual activity in the Earth, such as tectonic plates suddenly colliding at a faster rate. According to everything researchers have documented about the Bear Valley Intrusive Suite, however, no such activity transpired at the time the mountain range formed.
“There’s no obvious trigger,” Klein says. “The system is pretty much going along, and then we see this big burst of magma. So this challenges some basic notions in the field, and should inform how people think of how quickly these things could be happening today, in places like the Andes or the volcanos in Japan.”
This research was supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation. More

It’s an amazing moment when a topic learned in the classroom comes to life. For senior Darya Guettler, that moment came on a sweltering day while installing solar panels in low-income communities in Los Angeles, alongside workers who had been previously incarcerated.
Guettler was volunteering with an MIT Energy Initiative program called Solar Spring Break, which had partnered with Homeboy Industries, an organization that supports formerly incarcerated individuals through career opportunities in green energy. Drilling the panels into the roofs while sweat dripped down her neck, Guettler finally got a chance to see the utility of solar panels in action. When the volunteers switched on the lights, the members of the community got together and celebrated.
“I’ve never done that before, and it was a very unique experience,” Guettler says, recalling the internship. “As students, we’re usually designing the solar panels. Actually installing them and then turning the power on — it’s like all these families now have power for free and can finally run their air conditioning during the day. It made it all feel real.”
Guettler’s fascination with renewable energy began back in high school geography class. Listening to lectures on fuel scarcity, she wondered why renewable energy sources weren’t more widely implemented. Her curiosity encouraged her to research solar panel efficiency and galvanic cell temperature concentrations.
She arrived at MIT with the goal of mitigating climate change through technological innovation, and soon joined the MIT Undergraduate Energy Club, where she says she met inspiring and equally passionate students. Over time, they helped to shape her mindset about what her role could be in helping with the climate crisis. Now the club’s president, Guettler has been working to expand the club’s education outreach programs and encourage kids to get excited about ways they can use engineering to help the planet.
Although Guettler had long understood the need to improve solar technologies, it wasn’t until her Solar Spring Break experience that she made the connection between climate change and the need to involve many different parties in putting together solutions.
“After that, I was kind of hooked on the policy side as well, because I saw that there’s really a space for combining all these things,” she says. “Now all of a sudden it wasn’t just about employing the technology, which I had always been interested in, but also about who was going to be employing it, where it was going to be placed, and how we could make that process as equitable as possible.”
Guettler decided to combine her mechanical engineering major with a degree in political science and has gravitated to classes focused on the intersection of sustainable technologies and climate policy.
“They’re really interesting classes. I’ve got a class about engineering democratic development, one about election modeling, and one in energy storage,” she says. “Honestly, sometimes it’s hard to pick. There’s so many I want to take!”
But of all her classes, one that Guettler is most looking forward to now is her capstone for mechanical engineering, 2.s009 (Explorations in Product Design). The class — which this year challenges students to create social impact projects centered around kindness — begins by placing students into groups and giving them a budget. The groups then design a product and come up with a prototype and a business pitch for it.
“The kindness aspect is pretty much up to the group to decide,” Guettler explains. “It can a project centered around climate change, environmental protection, helping people with disabilities, assisting marginalized communities — I’m super excited to see what people come up with.”
Guttler spent the past summer working in consulting, and in her spare time taught middle and high school students about climate change from her remote cabin in Maine. The classes were taught through MIT Splash, which allows MIT students to teach any topic of their choice to interested younger students.
“It was all online, but it was really fun,” she says. “We just kind of talked about climate models and used this cool tool where you can adjust different policy factors and just see what happens. The kids had so many questions, and I loved getting to build their interest and talk about it with them.”
Talking with people of all ages and backgrounds about ways we can develop a more sustainable future has been a consistent theme throughout Guettler’s experience at MIT. Last year, she visited West Point for the Student Conference on U.S. Affairs, where she spoke with military advisors and generals about the concerns of climate change from a national security perspective.
“I was really interested to see that climate change is also a really big issue to them too, since there’s a lot of bases near coastal waters that will be under threat when sea levels rise,” she says. “There’s definitely been a wide range of people I’ve interacted with about the climate change crisis, but at the end of the day, it’s always the same core concepts. I love hearing people’s different ideas, because more people means more potential solutions, and honestly, at this point, we need any solutions we can get.”
As an elected student to the MIT Committee on Outside Engagements, as well as a founding member of MIT Divest, Guettler hasn’t been shy about the importance of holding political leaders and officials accountable for their decisions.
“I was talking a lot with students to see what they held as important values and what they wanted MIT to represent. Climate action kept on coming up, which led to a bigger discussion of who MIT engages with.”
Her experience so far has been positive overall, and she notes that student representatives have been given a seat on MIT’s Climate Action Advisory Committee, as well as been able to contribute to the MIT Climate Action Plan. The inclusion has allowed students to advocate for ways MIT can take initiative to reduce and offset their energy emissions.
While Guettler recognizes that major institutions have the largest immediate impact on improving the climate crisis, she still wants everyone to recognize the importance of individual actions as well.
“My message to everyone right now is just go and vote, just please go and do that. I’ve been phone banking for different state races right now and people have been hanging up in my face or cursing me out, saying it’s not that serious. I’m like, are you serious?” she laughs. “I honestly think voting right now is the best thing you can do for the climate. Even if you’re feeling overwhelmed, even if you don’t feel like you can make an impact — you have an important decision that you can make. Now just go and vote for it!” More

The Southern Ocean surrounding Antarctica is a region where many of the world’s carbon-rich deep waters can rise back up to the surface. Scientists have thought that the vast swaths of sea ice around Antarctica can act as a lid for upwelling carbon, preventing the gas from breaking through the ocean’s surface and returning to the atmosphere.
However, researchers at MIT have now identified a counteracting effect that suggests Antarctic sea ice may not be as powerful a control on the global carbon cycle as scientists had suspected.
In a study published in the August issue of the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles, the team has found that indeed, sea ice in the Southern Ocean can act as a physical barrier for upwelling carbon. But it can also act as a shade, blocking sunlight from reaching the surface ocean. Sunlight is essential for phytosynthesis, the process by which phytoplankton and other ocean microbes take up carbon from the atmosphere to grow.
The researchers found that when sea ice blocks sunlight, biological activity — and the amount of carbon that microbes can sequester from the atmosphere — decreases significantly. And surprisingly, this shading effect is almost equal and opposite to that of sea ice’s capping effect. Taken together, both effects essentially cancel each other out. 
“In terms of future climate change, the expected loss of sea ice around Antarctica may therefore not increase the carbon concentration in the atmosphere,” says lead author Mukund Gupta, who carried out the research as a graduate student in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS).
He emphasizes that sea ice does have other effects on the global climate, foremost through its albedo, or ability to reflect solar radiation.
“When the Earth warms up, it loses sea ice and absorbs more of this solar radiation, so in that sense, the loss of sea ice can accelerate climate change,” Gupta says. “What we can say here is, sea ice changes may not have such a strong effect on carbon outgassing around Antarctica through this capping and shading effect.”
Gupta’s coauthors are EAPS Professor Michael “Mick” Follows, and EAPS research scientist Jonathan Lauderdale.
The role of ice
Each winter, wide swaths of the Southern Ocean freeze over, forming vast sheets of sea ice that extend out from Antarctica for millions of square miles. The role of Antarctic sea ice in regulating the climate and the carbon cycle has been much debated, though the prevailing theory has been that sea ice can act as a lid to keep carbon in the ocean from escaping to the atmosphere.
“This theory is mostly thought of in the context of ice ages, when the Earth was much colder and the atmospheric carbon was lower,” Gupta says. “One of the theories explaining this low carbon concentration argues that because it was colder, a thick sea ice cover extended further into the ocean, blocking carbon exchanges with the atmosphere and effectively trapping it in the deep ocean.”
Gupta and his colleagues wondered whether an effect other than capping may also be in play. In general, the researchers have sought to understand how various features and processes in the ocean interact with ocean biology such as phytoplankton. They assumed that there might be less biological activity as a result of sea ice blocking microbes’ vital sunlight — but how strong would this shading effect be?
Equal and opposite
To answer that question, the researchers used the MITgcm, a global circulation model that simulates the many physical, chemical, and biological processes involved in the circulation of the atmosphere and ocean. With MITgcm, they simulated a vertical slice of the ocean spanning 3,000 kilometers wide and about 4,000 meters deep, and with conditions similar to today’s Southern Ocean. They then ran the model multiple times, each time with a different concentration of sea ice.
“At 100 percent concentration, there are no leaks in the ice, and it’s really compacted together, versus very low concentrations representing loose and sparse ice floes moving around,” Gupta explains.
They set each simulation to one of three scenarios: one where only the capping effect is active, and sea ice is only influencing the carbon cycle by preventing carbon from leaking back out to the atmosphere; another where only the shading effect is active, and sea ice is only blocking sunlight from penetrating the ocean; and the last in which both capping and shading effects are in play.
For every simulation, the researchers observed how the conditions they set affected the overall carbon flux, or amount of carbon that escaped from the ocean to the atmosphere.
They found that capping and shading had opposite effects on the carbon cycle, reducing the amount of carbon to the atmosphere in the former case and increasing it in the latter, by equal amounts. In the scenarios where both effects were considered, one canceled the other out almost entirely, across a wide range of sea ice concentrations, leading to no significant change in the carbon flux. Only when sea ice was at its highest concentration did capping have the edge, with a decrease in carbon escaping to the atmosphere.
The results suggest that Antarctic sea ice may effectively trap carbon in the ocean, but only when that ice cover is very expansive and thick. Otherwise, it seems that sea ice’s shading effect on the underlying organisms may counteract its capping effect.
“If one just considered the physics and the pure capping, or carbon barrier idea, that would be an incomplete way of thinking about it,” Gupta says. “This shows that we need to understand more of the biology under sea ice and how it underlies this effect.”
This research was supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation. More

Researchers at MIT have modeled how engineered and natural wood jams change river water levels, enabling an assessment of the trade-offs in flood risk and habitat creation for river restoration projects.
In a recent paper published in Geophysical Research Letters, researchers Elizabeth Follett ’09 PhD ’16, postdoc Isabella Schalko, and Donald and Martha Harleman Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering Heidi Nepf detail their analysis of 584 experiments measuring the backwater rise induced by model logjams in an experimental flume. Schalko ran these experiments, with the hope of filling gaps of the previously understudied physical processes to better explain just how water flow is impacted by large, densely packed groups of logs and to better inform current and future flood risk as well as river restoration projects.
“We’ve been missing a way to describe the physical mechanisms by which large groups of wood pieces affect the river water level,” says Follett, who is the lead author on the paper and a Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellow at Cardiff University. “Our work allows researchers to characterize structural properties of wood jams from field measurements, by measuring the river water level up- and downstream of the jam and applying our new model.”
The team hopes that the structural metrics will be useful for a wide range of scientists and engineers. The paper has also had an unintended benefit: bridging gaps between research groups.
“What I like most about the paper is that it brings together two research communities; those who look more at in-stream wood, and those more interested in canopy shear flows,” says Schalko.
The findings could have significant implications for government or non-profit organizations engaging in restoration projects. According to the researchers, there is growing interest all over the world in river restoration projects; up until now, it was understood that adding wood to rivers was good for restoration because wood increases flow heterogeneity by increasing water depth. Despite the growing popularity of wood as a solution, the physical processes have not been studied in depth and are not always accounted for in flood prediction models.
“Flood risk and river restoration projects have attracted recent investments, but up to now it has been difficult to include the effect of wood in flood models to improve the design and assessment of these projects,” says Follett. “This is a first step in the direction of being able to theoretically describe how wood alters the flow conditions in a river.” When joined with existing information, the new data on wood jams should better inform flood risk and river restoration efforts in the future. More