Oceans at MIT

Striving to understand, harness and sustain Earth's defining frontier.

http://oceans.mit.edu

America/New_York

20171105T020000 -0400 -0500 20181104T020000 EST 20180311T020000 -0500 -0400 EDT hsqb5mfg6baavv7utsoo79kv20@google.com 20180503T102308Z MIT Seminar | PAOC Oceanography and Climate Sack Lunch With the explosion of exoplanet discoveries and atmospheric characterization over the last decade, there is now the hope that in the near future, it will be possible to study the atmospheres of low mass, possibly Earthlike exoplanets. Interpreting these observations will be a grand challenge, because the diversity of rocky planet climates is likely to be enormous. Here I discuss the role that theory and idealized modeling can play in advancing our understanding of the possibilities. I present results on two key problems in exoplanet climate evolution: the loss of a planet’s water to space and the circulation (and possible nightside collapse) of atmospheres on tidally locked planets. I show that in both cases, scaling analysis allows the fundamentals of the problem to be understood in a robust and general way. I discuss the implications of these results for exoplanet habitability and the future search for biosignatures by groundand spacebased telescopes. 20151007T121000 20151007T131000 54-915 0

SLS – Robin Woodsworth (Harvard) – What can theory teach us about the climates of low-mass exoplanets?