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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Flood managers suspect August's big rainstorms and floods in Louisiana are becoming more common there and elsewhere because of climate change. One clue: Much of the damage was beyond the flood plain. -
Earth's changing climate has made the quest to understand wave behavior more important than ever, scientists say. Rising seas, storm surge and dune and reef erosion all shape Florida's Gulf Coast. -
July 2016 was Earth's hottest month on record. And Arctic ice has shrunk this year almost as much as it did in 2012 — the most severe melt to date. -
The study finds, in many cases, amounts barely higher than government guidelines allow, but significant levels in 66 water supplies. The chemicals are very persistent once in the environment. -
Camp Century was a research station and test site for deploying nuclear missiles before it was abandoned under the ice in the '60s. Scientists say pollutants left behind may spread as the ice melts. -
For example, June's average was up 1.62 F. A couple of degrees may not sound like much, but it's persistent warming over decades that alters the atmosphere, the oceans, and most everything else. -
Scientists have been attaching transmitters on the huge seagoing birds and are astonished by their ability to stay aloft. -
The National Park Service is racing to record soundscapes of each park that capture nature for the ear. "If we start to lose sounds of wilderness, we start to lose a piece of us," one scientist says.
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Divers exploring the famous Antikythera shipwreck, 200 feet beneath the water's surface in Greece, have turned up a heavy object they think might have been a powerful weapon in the first century B.C. -
Scientists say tiny bones dating back 700,000 years on the Indonesian island of Flores shine new light on how these mysterious, 3-foot-tall creatures got that way.
