Ocean Chemistry Change Laboratory

Climate change is an existential question shaping society. With each passing day, the news relates additional effects of our new world, from increasing storm severity to droughts and floods to warming and acidifying oceans. Recently, MIT’s new president pledged to devote MIT’s resources to helping to ameliorate the climate crisis. Yet, we must train our undergraduates to understand the science underlying Earth’s climate in order for them to make a sizable impact if they want to fix the problem. Here we propose to develop a course, Ocean Chemistry Change Laboratory, that provides experiential education about the ocean’s chemical role in stabilizing carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere and various geoengineering possibilities for sequestering CO2 into the abyss. The course will be designed to build on the Chemistry GIR as the only prerequisite, to maximize the number of MIT undergraduates who may enroll.