Ocean, Climate and Climate Change | Raffaele Ferrari | TEDxMIT

The ocean’s role in our lives goes beyond providing food, shipping routes and leisure. The ocean provides half of the oxygen we breathe and stores immense amounts of heat and carbon that shape the climate of our planet. In the last few decades, the ocean has slowed global warming by taking up most of the heat trapped by anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. However this heat will eventually be returned to the atmosphere, affecting our climate for many centuries to come. Therefore, it is important to curb emissions as soon as possible, because there is no going back once the ocean has heated up. I am a physical oceanographer interested in the circulation of the ocean, its interaction with the atmosphere and climate. I use a combination of observations, theory and numerical models to investigate all oceanic motions from scales of centimeters to thousands of kilometers. I got interested in oceanography while a physics major at the University of Torino in Italy. I so much enjoyed applying physics principles to explain the world around us that I decided to pursue a Ph.D. in physical oceanography at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (La Jolla, CA). After a short postdoc at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (Woods Hole, MA), I arrived at MIT (Cambridge, MA) in 2002. Here I have fun investigating the physics of the ocean, atmosphere and climate with the exceptional students and postdocs that come to MIT. It is very rewarding to apply physics principles to understand one of the defining scientific questions of our time: the inner workings of Earth’s climate. I am a faculty of the MIT Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Science Department, Director of the MIT Program of Atmospheres, Oceans and Climate, and a member of the MIT/WHOI Joint Program in Physical Oceanography and the MIT Climate Modeling Initiative. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx