Bryan Killett

The Weather Channel’s Secrets of the Earth aired an episode called Gravity (backup). In it, I described gravity and discussed GRACE, mantle convection, and climate change.

My more nuanced attribution statement didn’t make the cut: “Melting ice is what we expect in a warming world, and most of the warming since 1950 is very likely due to our CO₂ emissions.”

Also, melting sea ice doesn’t affect gravity because it’s already floating. GRACE can only detect changes in land ice. (more…)

I answered some questions about climate change and GRACE. You may want to search for my pseudonym “khayman80” to skip the irrelevant arguments.

At the 2012 JPL open house, I explained how GRACE detects Greenland mass loss, etc.

• Skip to “What’s a gigaton?”
• Skip to “How does GRACE reveal Greenland mass loss?”

I’m a scientist at the University of Colorado studying ocean tides. Before I started this research project, all I knew about the tides was what I’d seen at the beach. We can watch the tide flow in and out every 12 hours at the beach, but this only tells us about the tide at that one beach. I’m trying to measure how big the tides are everywhere in the ocean, at all the beaches in the world and even in the middle of the open ocean.

What makes this possible is a satellite system called GRACE (Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment). GRACE is a set of 2 satellites flying over the Earth measuring how strong gravity is at each point on the Earth’s surface. (more…)