Christopher Joyce
Christopher Joyce is a correspondent on the science desk at NPR. His stories can be heard on all of NPR's news programs, including NPR's Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition.
Joyce seeks out stories in some of the world's most inaccessible places. He has reported from remote villages in the Amazon and Central American rainforests, Tibetan outposts in the mountains of western China, and the bottom of an abandoned copper mine in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Over the course of his career, Joyce has written stories about volcanoes, hurricanes, human evolution, tagging giant blue-fin tuna, climate change, wars in Kosovo and Iraq, and the artificial insemination of an African elephant.
For several years, Joyce was an editor and correspondent for NPR's Radio Expeditions, a documentary program on natural history and disappearing cultures produced in collaboration with the National Geographic Society that was heard frequently on Morning Edition.
Joyce came to NPR in 1993 as a part-time editor while finishing a book about tropical rainforests and, as he says, "I just fell in love with radio." For two years, Joyce worked on NPR's national desk and was responsible for NPR's Western coverage. But his interest in science and technology soon launched him into parallel work on NPR's science desk.
In addition, Joyce has written two non-fiction books on scientific topics for the popular market: Witnesses from the Grave: The Stories Bones Tell (with co-author Eric Stover); and Earthly Goods: Medicine-Hunting in the Rainforest.
Before coming to NPR, Joyce worked for ten years as the U.S. correspondent and editor for the British weekly magazine New Scientist.
Joyce's stories on forensic investigations into the massacres in Kosovo and Bosnia were part of NPR's war coverage that won a 1999 Overseas Press Club award. He was part of the Radio Expeditions reporting and editing team that won the 2001 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University journalism award and the 2001 Sigma Delta Chi award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Joyce won the 2001 American Association for the Advancement of Science excellence in journalism award as well as the 2016 Communication Award from the National Academies of Sciences.
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A study in the Pacific Ocean finds that bags and bottles are sickening and killing reefs from Thailand to Australia. Coral reefs already are susceptible to disease due to unusually warm water. -
A new study says unusual patterns of the polar jet stream circling the Northern Hemisphere may have led to dramatic weather in Europe and North America. -
Hurricanes, fires and even hail contributed to billions of dollars in damages. The government study also finds that it was among the warmest years on record. -
A discovery of the remains of two infants in central Alaska provides evidence of the earliest wave of people to move from Asia into the Americas. -
The extreme warming trend continues, and scientists fear that floating sea ice will be gone by midcentury. That will have extraordinary effects closer to home. -
Scientists say they see the fingerprint of climate change in these storms, but it's too soon to say whether this is a new normal.
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Identifying where ice melts can help cities in planning for a future with elevated sea levels. In New York City, the sea level would be affected more by melting ice in northern Greenland than Canada. -
Hurricane Harvey's deluge left some homeowners and politicians wondering whether the whole system for predicting floods is any good. Scientists are hoping better data can lead to better flood maps. -
Delegates to the annual international climate meeting held by the U.N. are struggling to forge a unified approach to slowing climate change. Meanwhile, emissions of greenhouse gases keep rising. -
As researchers and engineers analyze the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, it's becoming clear that Houston's runaway development had a big role to play in flooding.
