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.