Carl Wunsch honored with Frontiers of Knowledge Award
In honor of receiving the 18th Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Climate Change, Carl Wunsch explains how his research was able to understand how oceans respond to changing climates and the need for international cooperation on research of this magnitude.
Carl Wunsch, the Cecil and Ida Green Professor Emeritus of Physical Oceanography, has been given the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Climate Change and Environmental Sciences for “foundational contributions to pioneering studies that revealed the impact of global warming on the world’s oceans,” according to the announcement.
Wunsch was selected for his approach to research that “epitomizes the power of collaborative science to answer fundamental questions on the future trajectory of the climate system, and its consequences for life on the planet.” Throughout his career, Wunsch has worked on projects on an international scale, helping organize the World Ocean Circulation Experiment (WOCE) to utilize emerging space-based and autonomous observation technologies for collecting ocean data on a scale previously inaccessible. Their work has validated the impacts and consequences of increasing atmospheric CO2 levels on global scales.
“International cooperation is absolutely essential to understanding the changing climate and conceivably doing something about it,” he says.
The Frontiers of Knowledge Award is designed to “recognize and reward world-class research and artistic creation, prizing contributions of singular impact for their originality and significance”. It spans eight categories, including fields such as climate change and environmental sciences, basic sciences, and humanities, and first began in 2008.
Wunsch ’62 PhD ’66 has worked on many aspects of physical oceanography and its climate implications throughout his career as a professor in MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS). Through a mix of observational methods, Wunsch has been able to gain valuable insight into the role of the ocean in the Earth’s climate system, on both global and regional scales and how they interact with other systems such as the atmosphere and ice sheets. He has authored over 250 scientific papers and five books. He served as EAPS department head from 1977 to 1981.
The BBVA Foundation, headquartered in Bilbao, Spain, supports scientific research, cultural creation, and the dissemination of knowledge and culture on behalf of the BBVA Group, a Spanish financial services company.
For more detail on his research and how it earned him the Frontiers of Knowledge Award, read the full press release.
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