On the 10th anniversary of Sandy, I wrote about barrier islands and the history of NY’s coastlines. It’s a tale of lost islands, forgotten hurricanes, and an endlessly transforming coast. Honored to share it with the @NewYorker

Thank you to Evan Lubofsky for the assignment and all the wonderful scientists who contributed. A special thank you to @Foukalpoint for inviting me aboard the Endeavor last year to view his work firsthand!

My cover story for @WHOI's Oceanus Magazine is now online. It's on ocean physics, the wild ways scientists measure it, and how the ocean's invisible currents dominate life on this planet. Check it out! https://t.co/g9YFy5fmj0

Last year I had the opportunity to spend a month(!) at sea with WHOI oceanographer @Foukalpoint. If any editors are interested in a behind the scenes look at the magical, difficult, and sometimes nauseating work of mapping our oceans, hit me up!

tl;dr Nuance is hard in 280 characters. Just read the article 😄

What remains clear is that an AMOC collapse is an existential threat, but as of now we cannot yet predict the mechanisms and timing of a collapse with any certainty. It's an imperfect look at the future, and perhaps for the layman, an unsatisfying one.

Most of the doomsday headlines, can often cherry pick and misrepresent model findings without acknowledging the complexity and context, even when the scientists fully acknowledge it themselves. Apocalypses make for good headlines. (My article's headline is not without sin here).

Direct observations of AMOC strength have not yet been able to determine what's natural variability or long term trend. And there is evidence that AMOC may be more resilient than we think.

Models can be limited by the uncertainty in the underlying data and computational power (Even on a supercomputer, our most advanced climate models can take a year to run). Necessary simplifications are often made to isolate and study certain dynamics.

But the ocean is chaotic and dizzyingly complex. Small changes, when scaled to the immense size of our planet, can create wildly different outcomes. While models are our best tools in understanding the future of our planet, they are not true digital twins of the planet.

The last time AMOC shutdown (<-there's some debate here too; there always is), temperatures dropped ~18 degrees Fahrenheit in Greenland and ~9 degrees across most of the North Atlantic—all within a few short decades. In today's world, an abrupt climate shift would be disastrous.

The Atlantic Meridional Circulation is a web of ocean currents that circulate water (and by extension heat) northward and southward in the Atlantic Ocean. Climate models show the system is due to slow by 2100. Under extreme forcing, some models show the system can even collapse.

Wrote a little story for @NautilusMag summing up what we know and don't know about #AMOC, a climate tipping point which made headlines recently after a paper predicted the system is on track to collapse. 1/x

The goal: map the Labrador Coastal Current so scientists may better understand how freshwater from the Greenland Ice Sheet is contributing to the slowdown of a critical ocean circulation and climate tipping point called AMOC.

For the next 26 days, I'm serving as a watchstander on oceanographic expedition to the Labrador Sea. Sharing pics and stories of my time at sea on Instagram if anyone wants to follow along. My handle is dkgarz . Frequency will depend on the weather and internet at sea

I’ve bugged my friends with this obsession for far too long. Now I get to share it all with you.

Word of the day, once again, has to be 'apricity' (17th century): the warmth of the sun on a chilly day. It's too good to lose.

Barrier islands are, in a geological sense, temporary arrangements of sand. To imagine them as places with any permanence at all is to misunderstand how the Earth works.

You’ve all played spot the Snow Leopard. Now let’s play spot the Pallas’s Cat. It’s no wonder these cats are hard to see in the wild. Photo by 徐征泽.