Community Corner
Sea Ice, Climate, and Observational Mathematics
The New
England Aquarium is pleased to welcome the Lorenz Center’s 3rd
Annual John Carlson Lecture to the Simons IMAX Theatre. Understanding and
predicting global climate change may be one of the most complex scientific
challenges we face today. MIT recently launched the Lorenz Center, a new
climate think tank devoted to fundamental inquiry. By emphasizing
curiosity-driven research, the center fosters creative approaches to learning
how climate works. To better understand this intricate system, we seek theories
that predict observations regionally and globally from human to geologic time
scales. But what are the relevant observations? And how to we construct useful
and realistic theories?
This year’s
lecturer, John Wettlaufer, has grappled with these questions by creating a
mathematical observatory and focusing its telescopes on Arctic ice and climate.
He is one of the world’s leading authorities on the physics of ice and its role
in climate.