Skip to content
RichseenAtlas← AtlasSign in

Wallace Broecker

person · earth

American geochemist who linked abrupt climate change in the paleoclimate record to changes in ocean overturning, and who drew the picture that shaped how everyone since has imagined it. His 1987 Natural History article "The Biggest Chill" introduced the "great ocean conveyor" diagram as a cartoon for a lay readership; it became the standard image of thermohaline circulation in textbooks and news graphics. Its success is also its problem: the real circulation is not a single belt, sinking is concentrated while upwelling is diffuse, and the Southern Ocean does at least as much work as the North Atlantic.

A person is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.

Read in · 1

Evidence · 1
Timeline

No dated observations are stored for this object. Atlas shows what was observed and when — it does not infer a history.

Connections · 1
Assembled narrative · 1

Assembled from 19 blocks · 1 evidence · 46 related

  1. Story
  2. American geochemist who linked abrupt climate change in the paleoclimate record to changes in ocean overturning, and who drew the picture that shaped how everyone since has imagined it. His 1987 Natural History article "The Biggest Chill" introduced the "great ocean conveyor" diagram as a cartoon for a lay readership; it became the standard image of thermohaline circulation in textbooks and news graphics. Its success is also its problem: the real circulation is not a single belt, sinking is concentrated while upwelling is diffuse, and the Southern Ocean does at least as much work as the North Atlantic.
  3. Knowledge
  4. Thermohaline Circulation
  5. Wallace Broecker
  6. Connections
  7. Thermohaline Circulation
  8. The great ocean conveyor is drawn
  9. Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC)
  10. Coastal and Equatorial Upwelling
  11. Antarctic Bottom Water (AABW)
  12. Southern Ocean
  13. Argo Profiling Float Array
  14. Wallace Broecker
  15. The great ocean conveyor is drawn
  16. The Argo design array is completed
  17. IPCC AR6 assesses AMOC decline as very likely and collapse as unlikely this century
  18. Evidence
  19. The article in which the "great ocean conveyor" diagram of global thermohaline circulation first appeared, drawn as a cartoon for a lay readership in a discussion of the Younger Dryas. Citation details taken from a Journal of Physical Oceanography review of the conveyor concept read via search summary; the original article was not consulted.
Close the narrative
Observed changes · 0

No public Signals are attached to this object. Signals show what changed and when it was observed — never a direction or a rank.

Actions

Read the assembled narrativeContinue in StudioOpen TwinTwin does not start a decision from this kind of object.ShareSaveSaved objects are part of the authenticated projection, which is declared and not yet built.

/atlas?object=PERSON_WALLACE_BROECKER&experience=PERSON_WALLACE_BROECKER