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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Earlier this week, NPR's Christopher Joyce reported on an experimental fire scientists set in Brazil to understand how these fires affect climate change. Here, he offers a reporter's notebook on what it's like to chase a fire through a tropical forest.
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Two companies say the best way to slow global warming is to dump iron into the oceans. The iron would trigger blooms of tiny plants that suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and then keep it trapped deep in the ocean. But scientists are wary.
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A draft report released Friday warns that climate change could threaten the lives of hundreds of millions of people in the decades to come. The international panel of scientists predicts drought and drying in many regions, including the American West.
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Alcohol-based fuels such as ethanol have been the underdog rivals of the oil industry for more than a century. A look at the history of ethanol and the current frenzy over its potential to kick U.S. oil dependence.
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For the past 15 years, writer Brian Hayes has made a hobby out of studying — and photographing — the manmade. He is the author of Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape. His subject on a recent trip to Washington? Traffic lights.
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Fossils found in northern China show that some of the first birds on Earth lived on the water. The exquisitely preserved fossils, resembling modern ducks or loons, lived 110 million years ago, when many forms of today' animals started to take shape.
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The discovery of figs in an 11,400-year-old house near the ancient city of Jericho may be evidence that cultivated crops came centuries before the first farmers planted cereal grains.
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Parts of New Orleans are sinking faster than anyone previously thought. realized. Satellite imagery is showing sinking that previous ground level measurements missed.
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Through a robotic vehicle, a team of scientists are the first to witness up-close the eruption of an underwater volcano. The volcano is not too far from a gigantic undersea trench where one continent-sized piece of the Earth's crust is grinding underneath another.
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A Cadillac salesman and an oil-rig engineer are working to put the nation's first offshore wind farm in the Gulf of Mexico.
