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	Terry Joyce, center, examines a core from a coral with Anne Cohen, front, and Delia Oppo. Anne and Delia are funded by the Institute to study what tropical corals can reveal about past climate changes. (Photo by Tom Kleindinst, WHOI)
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Pursuing greater understanding of the ocean’s role in climate change, the Ocean and Climate Change Institute (OCCI) launched support for a number of new research projects, one new OCCI fellow, and a graduate research assistant. The Institute also provided continued support for ongoing fellows and projects.

The OCCI funded several projects to establish or enhance Atlantic and Arctic Ocean observing systems and further the understanding of the roles of the Arctic and Northern Atlantic in abrupt climate change. Projects include looking at the deep Arctic as an indicator of climate shifts in the last millennium; laboratory studies of oceanic mixing and its role in climate change; placing constraints on past changes in the ocean conveyor using proxies; a numerical model simulation of freshwater-induced abrupt climate change; and enhancements of particle and carbon flux studies at Line W (a 250-mile instrument array off Cape Cod) and of freshwater export off southeast Greenland. The Institute is continuing support for projects looking at freshwater import and export from the Arctic; abrupt climate change as reflected in ocean sediments in the Arctic, Caribbean, and in the western north Atlantic; using gliders to obtain transoceanic sections of temperature and salinity between Greenland and the Iberian Peninsula; and a numerical study of the sensitivity of the Gulf Stream pathway to changes in the ocean conveyor.

The Institute supported Scott Doney (MC&G) in his third year as a fellow, Bernadette Sloyan (PO), who left WHOI to return to her home base in Hobart, Australia, and Jeff Donnelly (G&G, shared with COI), who examines natural archives of Holocene and Pleistocene environmental change in coastal regions. Peter Winsor (PO) was appointed a fellow in abrupt climate change. He is a specialist in Arctic oceanography and is doing numerical simulations of abrupt climate change and collecting new data in the Arctic from ships and drifting instrumentation.

Rosemarie Came, a previous Joint Program student in paleo-oceanography, matriculated and student support was shifted to a third year student in the Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry department, Nathalie Goodkin, who is using long-lived coral at Bermuda to study climate variability during the past millennium.

—Terrence Joyce, Institute Director