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Christopher Joyce

Credit Doby / NPR

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.

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Science
4:16 pm
Mon September 17, 2012

What Drove Early Man Across Globe? Climate Change

Credit DEA Picture Library / De Agostini/Getty Images
An artist's re-creation of the first human migration to North America from across the Bering Sea.
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Originally published on Mon September 17, 2012 6:39 pm

Anthropologists believe early humans evolved in Africa and then moved out from there in successive waves. However, what drove their migrations has been a matter of conjecture.

One new explanation is climate change.

Anthropologist Anders Erikkson of Cambridge University in England says the first few hardy humans who left Africa might've gone earlier but couldn't. Northeastern Africa — the only route to Asia and beyond — was literally a no man's land.

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Science
3:31 am
Tue September 11, 2012

A Berry So Shiny, It's Irresistible (And Inedible)

Credit Silvia Vignolini et al. via PNAS
The shiny blue berries of the tropical Pollia condensata plant rely on their looks, not nutritional content, to attract birds to spread their seeds.
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Originally published on Tue September 11, 2012 9:57 am

That fake fruit in the wooden bowls that hotels love to decorate their lobbies with never looks quite right. No, apparently it takes nature to make a fake that looks even better than the real thing.

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Megafires: The New Normal In The Southwest
5:20 am
Sun August 26, 2012

'Torture Lab' Kills Trees To Learn How To Save Them

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Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Powers walks along plastic gutters designed to keep rain away from tree roots to simulate drought. Scientists here are studying the effects of sustained drought conditions on the tree species of the Southwest.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Instruments attached to the trees monitor how they respond to simulated drier, hotter conditions. Scientists say the cycle of heat and drought in the Southwest has intensified because of climate change.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Powers looks in on a climate-controlled tree chamber. Silvery hoses carry heated air into the chambers.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
The temperature inside this tree chamber is about 7 degrees hotter than outside — roughly the increase predicted by computer models of climate change over the next 80 years or so.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Researchers study every aspect of the tree as it fails under intense heat and lack of water. This device monitors the tree's respiration.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Powers walks past a tree chamber. Researchers say drought-stressed trees appear to start consuming their own carbon stores.

Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Instruments wrapped around the stem of a tree measure its diameter every few minutes.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
A sign outside a tree chamber
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Steve Garrity (from left), Heath Powers and Mike Jenkins look into a tree chamber. Scientists at the lab hope their work will help predict where tree losses will occur in a warming climate, and where trees might survive.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Heath Powers climbs through a maze of wiring at the "tree torture" lab at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Powers is a project manager at the lab.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Heath Powers, a project manager at the Los Alamos National Laboratory's "tree torture" lab, climbs through a maze of wiring outside a tree chamber.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
A tree stands surrounded by a chamber that keeps the temperature about 7 degrees warmer than the outside air. Scientists say the cycle of heat and drought in the region has intensified because of a warming climate.
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Originally published on Sun August 26, 2012 6:03 pm

Last of a five-part series

The droughts that have parched big regions of the country are killing forests.

In the arid Southwest, the body count is especially high. Besides trying to keep wildfires from burning up these desiccated forests, there's not much anyone can do. In fact, scientists are only now figuring out how drought affects trees.

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Megafires: The New Normal In The Southwest
2:54 pm
Fri August 24, 2012

Is It Too Late To Defuse The Danger Of Megafires?

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Timmons and Springer work in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests, which were burned during last year's Wallow Fire. The largest fire in Arizona history, Wallow barreled through a half-million acres of forest.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Kralicek logs data on plants and wildflowers that have grown back in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests since the Wallow Fire.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Ecologists use tape measures to track regrowth following last year's Wallow Fire.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
A team of students from Northern Arizona University walks through a clearing on the way to a remote location they are studying in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Northern Arizona University researchers are trying to study the effects of fire on treated and untreated forest areas in Apache-Sitgreaves.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Northern Arizona University students Zac Timmons (left) and Karen Kralicek (center) work with plant ecologist Judy Springer in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests in east-central Arizona. They are studying the effects of forest restoration treatments following the Wallow Fire of 2011.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
A researcher holds a horned lizard found in a study site, a positive sign of life returning after the Wallow Fire
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
A year after the Wallow Fire, students chart every square inch of an open meadow in an area where the fire raged.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Madison Daniels, a student at Northern Arizona University, takes a short break from gathering data in a meadow in Apache-Sitgreaves. Both students and faculty live in the forest for weeks while they conduct their ecological research.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Wally Covington is director of the Ecological Restoration Institute at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. He helped create the 4FRI project, whose goal is to restore the natural Ponderosa pine forest.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
A worker walks by a feller buncher, a heavy machine used to clear timber, in a section of Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests. Covington's group is trimming the forest to make it more fire-resistant.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Bill Armstrong, fire manager for the Santa Fe National Forest in New Mexico, is a firm believer in thinning forests and returning them to a natural burn cycle to avoid megafires.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
The Forest Service is thinning and treating the forest around the Sierra de los Pinos neighborhood in the Jemez Mountains, west of Los Alamos, N.M. The goal is to reduce the threat posed by future megafires.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
The Forest Service is also trying to get people who live in the Jemez Mountains area to thin and maintain the forests around their homes.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Contract foresters work on a thinning operation in Los Griegos Peak, on U.S. Forest Service land in the Jemez Mountains.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
A forest-thinning operation in Los Griegos Peak.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
A thinned and treated forest in the Sangre de Cristo mountains, near the Santa Fe watershed. To effectively protect against wildfire threats, the Forest Service needs to burn tree litter and other detritus that remain on the forest floor.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Bill Armstrong of the U.S. Forest Service opens the security gate at the Santa Fe watershed, in New Mexico's Sangre de Cristo mountains.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Armstrong stands in front of a Ponderosa pine, locally known as a yellow belly pine.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
A view of a private home in the Jemez Mountains.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
A view of the Valles Caldera. The valley served as a high-mountain pasture for ranchers for years. In the distance you can see the Santa Fe National Forest, which burned during the 2011 Las Conchas fire.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
William Armstrong, fire manager for the Santa Fe National Forest service, says lush forests can be a "plague."
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Last year's Wallow Fire, the largest in Arizona history, barreled through the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests, in the east-central part of the state. The forests are now being thinned to reduce the threat posed by future wildfires.
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Originally published on Fri August 24, 2012 7:47 pm

Fourth in a five-part series

Forests in the Southwest have become a fuel stockpile. A century of U.S. Forest Service policy of quashing all fires has allowed forests to become overgrown, and now a warming climate is making the problem worse.

Scientists are trying to defuse these green time bombs. Is it too late?

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Megafires: The New Normal In The Southwest
3:18 am
Fri August 24, 2012

In Southwest, Worst-Case Fire Scenario Plays Out

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Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Craig Allen, left, a research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, and Jorge Castro, a visiting professor of ecology from Spain, survey a plateau ravaged during last year's Las Conchas fire in New Mexico. The megafire burned over 150,000 acres of forest.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
Jorge Castro looks onto the Cerro Picacho and the St. Peter's Dome trail, adjacent to the Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico. Last year's Las Conchas fire was the third in a string of blazes that devastated the area.
Credit David Gilkey / NPR
University of Arizona professor Tom Swetnam examines tree samples at the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research in Tucson, Ariz. Swetnam says forests are burning hotter because they are overgrown.
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Originally published on Fri August 24, 2012 7:48 pm

Third of a five-part series

As the Earth's average temperature creeps upward, climate scientists have predicted record heat waves and droughts. That's what we've seen this summer in the U.S.

The question has become, are we now seeing the real damage climate change can do?

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