From freshly formed simple craters on the Moon to hydrogen sulfide production in the Salton Sea, DEEPS undergraduate students participated in cutting edge research throughout the 2025 summer break. We are proud to showcase some of these research projects with this photo series.

DEEPS Assistant Professor Harriet Lau recently presented at TEDx New England on the our planet's natural cycles and rhythms – from micrometers to thousands of miles, and from milliseconds to millions of years. Throughout Earth's multi-billion-year history, these rhythms collide, interact, and unfold, influencing humanity and shaping our experience of time.

ecoRI News spoke with experts about the risks that Rhode Island will face going forward as heat waves hit more frequently and for longer periods. DEEPS Chair Meredith Hastings commented, noting that when it’s hot outside, air quality tends to get worse. “Under hotter conditions we speed up reactions,” she said. “That can lead to the faster production of secondary pollution.”

Dozens of veteran climate scientists have launched a coordinated response to a Trump administration report that casts doubt on the severity of climate change. Kim Cobb, DEEPS Professor and Director of IBES, told CNN it’s significant that the Trump administration is deep-sixing the climate assessments at the same time it’s releasing a misleading new report. She also said she hopes to help “set the record straight” on climate science in their response to the DOE report.

A new art installation on Public Street by artist Eli Nixon features colorful windsocks that are raised as local air quality fluctuates. DEEPS Chair Meredith Hastings attended the windsock event and spoke about air quality issues, which she has studied as a part of her project Breathe Providence.

This article in Nature investigates how researchers are filing appeals, seeking court remedies, turning to philanthropy and starting GoFundMe campaigns to support their research. The article includes the cancellation of Assistant Professor Mara Freilich's NASA grant, which engaged citizens in studying the air quality around California's Salton Sea.

DEEPS Shorts is a video series highlighting the diverse research within Brown’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences. This week we hear from John Nicklas, PhD Candidate and Climate and Health Scientist. Created by PhD Candidate Élise Beaudin, with support from Communications Specialist Mae Jackson.

Assistant Professor Mara Freilich is one of the seventeen researchers on cross-disciplinary teams to win funding in the first year of "Scialog: Neurobiology and Changing Ecosystems", a three-year initiative that aims to spark new science exploring neurobiological response to rapid and extensive human-caused environmental changes. Freilich and her team will be exploring "From Feeding to Flux: Unraveling the Impact of Animal Behavior on Global Ocean Carbon Flow."

DEEPS Shorts is a video series highlighting the diverse research within Brown’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences. This week we hear from Aikaterina “Katia” Tavri, Postdoctoral Research Associate and Remote Sensing Specialist using satellite imageries to study sea ice variability. Created by PhD Candidate Élise Beaudin, with support from Communications Specialist Mae Jackson.

DEEPS Shorts is a video series highlighting the diverse research within Brown’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences. This week features Pierre Chabert, Postdoctoral Research Associate and Physical Oceanographer studying extreme flooding events in New England. Created by PhD Candidate Élise Beaudin, with support from Communications Specialist Mae Jackson.

DEEPS Shorts is a video series highlighting the diverse research within Brown’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences. Our first scientist is Lily Dove, Postdoctoral Fellow and Physical Oceanographer exploring the Southern Ocean: The Lung of the Ocean. Created by PhD Candidate Élise Beaudin, with support from Communications Specialist Mae Jackson.

Improving water systems is a key way we can better adapt to climate change, according to Brown oceanographer Baylor Fox-Kemper.

Experts react to the US Environmental Protection Agency's announcement that it would undertake massive deregulatory actions, including DEEPS Chair Meredith Hastings and IBES Director Kim Cobb. In an interview with The Herald, Professor Meredith Hastings explained that the EPA’s regulatory system may not be perfect, but federal oversight has been historically crucial in improving air and water quality at state and local levels.

In a new article in Nature Review Earth & Environment, Postdoctoral Fellow Lily Dove explores how, with Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite data, oceanographers are beginning to understand the global distribution of submesoscale currents and their associated vertical motions. This information will inform global and regional-scale climate models, improving predictions of heat and carbon storage in a changing climate.

Professor Amanda Lynch was recently named to the Advisory Council of the The Hague Institute for Global Justice: North World Approach. Building upon the success of The Washington Compact for Off World Governance, The Hague Institute for Global Justice is pioneering a new frontier in global governance with The North World Approach. This initiative is a necessary step towards ensuring sustainable, cooperative, and just governance in one of the world’s most strategically significant and rapidly changing regions—the Arctic.

A team of six DEEPS researchers (including Ewerton Santos, Bumsoo Kim, Rafael Tarozo, Sarah McGrath, Marcelo Alexandre, and Professor Yongsong Huang) recently published an article in "Rapid Communications in Mass Spectrometry" presenting a new reactor system that greatly outperforms the conventional reactor system in efficiency, precision, and accuracy.

As President Donald Trump’s administration looks to reverse a cornerstone finding that climate change endangers human health and welfare, scientists say they just need to look around because it’s obvious how bad global warming is and how it’s getting worse. “There is no possible world in which greenhouse gases are not a threat to public health,” said IBES Director and DEEPS Professor Kim Cobb. “It’s simple physics coming up against simple physiology and biology, and the limits of our existing infrastructure to protect us against worsening climate-fueled extremes.”

A new study by DEEPS Professors Colleen Dalton, Chris Huber, Tim Herbert, and Senior Research Associate Weimin Si explores how variations in global mean sea level over millions of years originate from changes in both the climate and solid Earth systems.

Since US President Donald Trump stated his ambition to acquire Greenland by sale or by force, the upcoming election in Greenland and political discourse among the almost 60,000 Inuit inhabitants has acquired a new level of intensity. In a new article in the Journal of the North Atlantic & Arctic, authors Dr. Charles H. Norchi from the University of Maine School of Law and Dr. Amanda H. Lynch from Brown University cast light on the past, present, and future issues of international interest that Greenlanders face in the upcoming elections.

Julia Vaz explores the Amazon's flying rivers and their unique relationship with climate change in her essay, written for the EEPS 1400 Climate Modeling class during the Fall 2024 semester.

Alejandra Lopez, a first-year PhD student in the Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences at Brown University, explored the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) in a paper as part of EEPS 1400 Climate Modeling (Qualitative Track) this past fall semester.

IBES Director and DEEPS Professor Kim Cobb acknowledged the grim reality of increasing global temperatures while asserting that "peak fossil fuel emissions are in reach, this year or next...if we keep our eyes on the prize."

Some environmental nonprofits and researchers still don’t have access to their federal grants after the Trump administration ordered them halted on Jan. 27. Professor Laurence C. Smith offered commentary, noting that he has three new federally funded projects he would normally recruit graduate students to work on, “but I don’t know whether I should recruit them or not.”

A recent article features forthcoming research from Assistant Professor Daniel Ibarra and Physics Professor Brad Marston. Their research shows that using crushed rock dust to speed up the rate at which soils absorb carbon dioxide could also affect the climate by making Earth’s surface reflect more or less of the sun’s radiation.

Heatmap queried more than 30 climate insiders, including DEEPS Professor and IBES Director Kim Cobb, about the future of environmental policy.

Professor Amanda Lynch, who has studied climate change in the Arctic for nearly 30 years, spoke to the New York Times about president-elect Trump's calls to acquire Greenland and the Panama Canal. She notes that the new trade routes created by ice melt could heighten the risk of environmental disasters. “An oil spill or some other toxic accident on that route is inevitable and could already have happened and we just don’t know it,” she said.

Professor Baylor Fox-Kemper, co-author of a study that looks at how climate scientists communicate risk, told Utah Public Radio that it can be hard to describe scenarios in which the actual likelihood of something happening is difficult to quantify. Scientists, he said, frequently want a “big splash,” even before their work is peer-reviewed, in order to drive change — especially if the risk seems substantial. “You don’t want to do something that you don’t have to do, but you also don’t want to fail to do something when you really should,” Fox-Kemper said. “It’s a hard problem.”

On Friday, Associate Justice Brian P. Stern authorized Special Master Rick Land to guide Rhode Island Recycled Metals through the environmental permitting process. During and after the July 10th fire at Rhode Island Recycled Metals, Brown University’s Breathe Providence project detected significant spikes in a particulate matter called PM2.5 in South Providence, Fox Point, Hope Street, and Pawtucket. Meredith Hastings, DEEPS Chair and director of Breathe Providence, commented on the court's decision, writing that it's “a step in the right direction. Industries in the Port of Providence really do need to be held accountable and make changes that will protect the health, well being and quality of environment for the surrounding communities and their workers.”

Fishermen and scientists report that tarpon, a large warm-water trophy fish, have been migrating north. In June, Thomas Czernik, a DEEPS graduate student was fishing for striped bass at night off Aquidneck Island in Rhode Island. “I feel lucky,” Czernik says. “It’s a memory I’ll have forever. I’m thankful.”

Brown’s Equitable Climate Futures initiative is looking to bridge the gap between research and community action by bringing together interdisciplinary teams of researchers and community members. Professor Baylor Fox-Kemper, a faculty director of ECF said the initiative is “science meets social sciences meets outlooks for climate change.”

Politicians and green advocates want to keep the focus on limiting global warming to 1.5C, even though scientists say the planet is already on track to soon breach the target. Professor Kim Cobb offered commentary on the issue, noting that people are “more and more talking about how we can limit overshoot.”

UK-based scientists have used a new calculation method to find that global temperature rise is nearly at the Paris Agreement limit. DEEPS Professor and IBES Director Kim Cobb offered commentary on the study, saying it presents "a new approach to an age-old and critical question."

A recent study in Nature Communications, co-authored by Professor Baylor Fox-Kemper, reveals that turbulence from ocean fronts—driven by submesoscale shear—significantly influences the transfer of heat, gases, and nutrients in the upper ocean layer, impacting climate and ocean productivity, especially in winter, which could improve climate model accuracy.

Kim Cobb, a professor of earth, environmental and planetary sciences and Director of the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, delivered the Family Weekend keynote about the inflection point at which the world finds itself — and the numerous ways that the current generation of students is rising to face critical climate challenges through research and action. “I am extremely optimistic, mostly because the work that we’re doing here at Brown is illustrative of the engagement of this institution, and our entire community in making solutions that are durable and equitable,” Cobb said.

In a recent study published in Nature Communications Earth & Environment, OCE High School Interns working with Professor Emanuele Di Lorenzo found that marine heatwaves in the Gulf of Alaska have intensified since 2013, disrupting ocean currents known as eddies, which support marine life. Using 30 years of satellite data and climate models, the team examined how these heatwaves affect nutrient-rich ocean currents called eddies, which support phytoplankton. The study revealed that marine heatwaves create high-pressure conditions that weaken coastal circulation, reducing the formation of eddies and threatening marine life.

According to new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, conducted during three research cruises from 2017 to 2019 in the Mediterranean Sea, scientists discovered that tiny ocean organisms are transported to deeper waters by currents called intrusions, significantly impacting the ocean's ecosystem. “We found that because these organisms are so small, they can be swept up by ocean currents that then bring them deeper than where they grow,” said Assistant Professor Mara Freilich. “It’s often a one-way trip for these organisms, but by taking this trip, they play a critical role in connecting different parts of the ocean.”

This week, the eleventh session of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Research Board considered critical developments in Artificial Intelligence for weather forecasting under the leadership of Board Chair Professor Amanda Lynch.

Following the catastrophic damage caused by Hurricanes Helene and Milton, scientists warn that the Atlantic hurricane season is far from over. Assistant Professor Chris Horvat commented, “The Gulf (of Mexico) remains fairly anomalously warm even at this point in the year, so we shouldn’t relax."

IBES Director and DEEPS Professor Kim Cobb noted that Hurricanes Helene and Milton "should serve 'as a wake up call' for emergency preparedness, resilience planning and the increased use of fossil fuels."