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Richard Harris

Credit Doby Photography / NPR

Award-winning journalist Richard Harris reports on science issues for NPR's newsmagazines Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Weekend Edition.

Harris, who joined NPR in 1986, has traveled to the ends of the earth for NPR. His reports have originated from Timbuktu, the South Pole, the Galapagos Islands, Beijing during the SARS epidemic, the center of Greenland, the Amazon rain forest and the foot of Mt. Kilimanjaro (for a story about tuberculosis).

In 2010, Harris' reporting uncovered that the blown-out BP oil well in the Gulf of Mexico was spewing out far more oil than asserted in the official estimates. He covered the United Nations climate negotiations, starting with the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, followed by Kyoto in 1997 and Copenhagen in 2009. Harris was a major contributor to NPR's award-winning 2007-2008 "Climate Connections" series.

Over the course of his career, Harris has been the recipient of many of the journalism and science industries' most prestigious awards. The University of California at Santa Cruz awarded Harris the 2010-11 Alumni Achievement Award – the school's highest honor. In 2002, Harris was elected an honorary member of Sigma Xi, the scientific research society. Harris shared a 1995 Peabody Award for investigative reporting on NPR about the tobacco industry.

As part of the team that collaborated on NPR's 1989 series "AIDS in Black America," Harris was awarded a Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Silver Baton, a first place award from the National Association of Black Journalists and an Ohio State Award. In 1988, Harris won the American Association for the Advancement of Science Journalism Award for his report, "Anti-Noise: Can Technology Turn Noise into Quiet?" which explored a revolutionary technology that uses computer-generated noise to cancel out, not just mask, unwanted noise.

Before joining NPR, Harris was a science writer for the San Francisco Examiner. From 1981 to 1983, Harris was a staff writer at The Tri-Valley Herald in Livermore, California, covering science, technology, and health issues. Under the auspices of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Harris spent the summer of 1980 as a Mass Media Science Fellow reporting on science issues for The Washington Star, in Washington, D.C.

Harris is co-founder of the Washington, D.C., Area Science Writers Association, as well as past president of the National Association of Science Writers.

A California native, Harris was valedictorian of his college graduating class at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1980. He earned a bachelor's degree in biology, with highest honors.

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Science
5:22 am
Sat June 23, 2012

Rio+20 Doesn't Get Further Than Vague Declaration

Credit Andre Penner / AP
U.N. General Assembly President Nassir Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon, Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, Brazil's Secretary of the Conference Luis Figueiredo Machado and Rio+20 Secretary General Sha Zukang attend the closing ceremony of the Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro on Friday.
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Originally published on Sat June 23, 2012 10:15 pm

The Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development was the biggest United Nations conference ever, but it may be one of the biggest duds. It produced no major agreements — just a vaguely worded declaration that has been widely derided.

More than 45,000 people registered for the event in Rio de Janeiro, but diplomats couldn't even agree about the meeting's objective until 2:45 a.m. on Tuesday, just before heads of state and other high-level delegates started arriving in Rio.

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Energy
5:11 pm
Tue June 19, 2012

Shell Faces Pushback As Alaska Drilling Nears

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Credit Richard Harris / NPR
Shell says it hopes to never need to use its new 300-foot-long, $100 million oil recovery ship named Nanuq for anything other than drills and training.
Credit The Washington Post / Getty Images
Richard E. Reanier, an independent archaeologist working for Shell Oil, uses GPS to record the location of the remains of a sod house along the Chukchi Sea coast near Wainwright, Alaska, in July 2011.
Credit Richard Harris / NPR
Pete Slaiby, Shell's vice president for Alaska, says the costs of doing business in Alaska are big, "but the volumes are substantial."
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Originally published on Tue June 19, 2012 5:59 pm

The federal government could soon give the final go-ahead for Royal Dutch Shell to begin drilling for oil in the Arctic Ocean. Shell has spent $4 billion since 2007 to prepare for this work, and is hoping to tap into vast new deposits of oil.

But the plan to drill exploratory wells is controversial — opposed by environmental groups and some indigenous people as well.

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Energy
2:15 am
Tue June 19, 2012

Rio Environment Meeting Focuses On 'Energy For All'

Credit Andrew Burton / Getty Images
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon speaks during a news conference on June 7 at the United Nations headquarters in New York City. Ban wants to focus on making energy available to the poorest populations of the world.
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Originally published on Tue June 19, 2012 8:48 am

Diplomats and activists from around the world are meeting in Rio de Janeiro this week to talk about how the planet's growing population can live better lives without damaging the environment. The Rio+20 meeting marks the 20th anniversary of the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio, a watershed meeting to address topics as diverse as climate change and biodiversity.

At this follow-up meeting, delegates hope to highlight an issue that was almost absent from the Earth Summit: making energy available to everyone in the world.

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Animals
2:02 am
Tue June 5, 2012

Splish Splat? Why Raindrops Don't Kill Mosquitoes

Credit CDC Public Health Image Library
When a raindrop hits a mosquito, the mosquito and drop join together, and the mosquito rides the drop for about a thousandth of a second before its wings, which act like kites, pull it out of the water.
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Originally published on Tue June 5, 2012 7:53 am

Imagine how tough life would be if raindrops weighed 3 tons apiece as they fell out of the sky at 20 mph. That's how raindrops look to a mosquito, yet a raindrop weighing 50 times more than one can hit the insect and the mosquito will survive.

How?

Put yourself in a mosquito's shoes — or rain boots — for a moment and step outside into a downpour of seemingly gigantic raindrops.

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The Salt
11:45 pm
Tue May 29, 2012

Nuclear Tuna Is Hot News, But Not Because It's Going To Make You Sick

Credit Yoshikazu Tsuno / AFP/Getty Images
A Tokyo sushi restaurant displays blocks of fat meat tuna cut out from a 269kg bluefin tuna.
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Originally published on Wed May 30, 2012 4:17 am

What snarky headline writer could resist a story about "hot tuna?" Or how about "tuna meltdown?"

Really, it seems just plain daffy to ignore a new study that says some Pacific bluefin tuna picked up traces of radioactive material from the Fukushima nuclear disaster last year and brought it across the Pacific Ocean.

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Research News
4:10 pm
Thu May 17, 2012

Ancient Deep-Sea Bacteria Are In No Hurry To Eat

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Credit Bo Barker Jorgensen / Science/AAAS
Researcher Hans Roy opens a core sample taken from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. A core sample like this one contained bacteria that settled on the seafloor 86 million years ago.
Credit Hans Roy / Science/AAAS
Researchers bring aboard a sea floor core sample. Researchers found 86-million-year-old bacteria living in the clay.
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Originally published on Thu May 17, 2012 6:16 pm

Back when the dinosaurs ruled the Earth, some hardy bacteria took up residence at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Eighty six million years later, they're still there. And a new study says they're living out the most Spartan lifestyle known on this planet.

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Research News
4:58 pm
Thu May 10, 2012

Why Was A Huge 'Rogue Earthquake' Not Destructive?

Credit David McNew / Getty Images
Layers of earthquake-twisted ground are seen where the 14 freeway crosses the San Andreas Fault near Palmdale, Calif. The San Andreas Fault, like the kind that caused the huge earthquake off the coast of Indonesia, is a strike-slip fault, where the tectonic plates slide past each other.
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Originally published on Thu May 10, 2012 9:50 pm

They're calling it a "rogue earthquake."

On April 11 of this year, one of the 10 biggest earthquakes ever recorded struck off the coast of Indonesia. It was felt from Bangladesh to Australia.

You may not have even heard of this magnitude 8.6 quake. It barely made the news in the U.S. because it did very little damage. Two people died, but there was no massive tsunami.

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Space
5:37 am
Sat May 5, 2012

Look Up: Tonight, 'Supermoon' Is Closer To Earth

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Credit Jewel Samad / AFP/Getty Images
The statue of Freedom, atop of the U.S. Capitol Building, is pictured against a "supermoon" on March 19, 2011.
Credit Dmitry Lovetsky / AP
The full moon rises behind statues of angels fixed at the St. Isaak's Cathedral in St.Petersburg, Russia.
Credit Aris Messinis / Getty Images
Tourists look at the moon rising over the ancient temple of Poseidon at cape Sounion, south of Athens.
Credit Robert Michael / GettyImages
Almost full moon behind the cross of the Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady) in Dresden, eastern Germany, on May 4, 2012.
Credit Petros Karadjias / AP
The full moon rises behind a steeple with cross of Ayia Thekla (Saint Thekla) Christian Orthodox church near coastal resort of Ayia Napa, Cyprus.
Credit Rajanish Kakade / AP
The moon is seen over the landmark Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in Mumbai, India, on Saturday.
Credit Sergei Grits / AP
The full moon rises behind a steeple with crosses of an Orthodox church in the town of Novogrudok, Belarus.
Credit Mandel Ngan / AFP/GettyImages
The moon hangs over Chevy Chase, Md., Saturday night.
Credit David McNew / Getty Images
A supermoon rises behind wind turbines Saturday near Palm Springs, Calif.
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Originally published on Wed May 23, 2012 9:49 am

Head outside at sunset tonight and look up at the sky. If the full moon seems a tad larger than normal to you, that means one of two things: You are exceptionally perceptive, or you were already expecting to be dazzled, after hearing some of the buzz about this year's "supermoon."

It turns out that all full moons are not created equal. That's because the moon's orbit around the Earth isn't a perfect circle — it's an ellipse. And tonight, we're in luck.

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Environment
4:11 pm
Thu May 3, 2012

Greenland's Ice Melting More Slowly Than Expected

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Credit Ian Joughin / UW, Sarah Das/WHOI and Richard Harris/NPR
Researchers studying Greenland's ice say it is melting more slowly than previously thought. Here, ice travels down a relatively small outlet glacier into the sea.
Credit Richard Harris / UW, Sarah Das/WHOI and Richard Harris/NPR
Ian Joughin, a polar scientist, says the "worst-case scenario" of 6 feet of sea level rise is unlikely. "My guess is probably 3 feet or less," he says.
Credit Richard Harris / UW, Sarah Das/WHOI and Richard Harris/NPR
At the peak of the summer, meltwater runoff forms streams and lakes on the ice surface in this 2007 photo.
Credit Richard Harris / UW, Sarah Das/WHOI and Richard Harris/NPR
Rushing water at the end of a lake has cut a deep channel into the ice. Greenland's ice contains enough water to raise sea levels by 20 feet.
Credit Richard Harris / UW, Sarah Das/WHOI and Richard Harris/NPR
Rivers drop into deep holes called moulins. Once the water reaches the bedrock, it lubricates the underside of ice sheets, so they move faster.
Credit Sarah Das / UW, Sarah Das/WHOI and Richard Harris/NPR
Researchers say the rate of glacier movement is still increasing. Over the past decade, glaciers have sped up an average of 30 percent.
Credit Ian Joughin / UW, Sarah Das/WHOI and Richard Harris/NPR
As glacial ice moves down toward the coast, it gets funneled through outlet glaciers, and large and small icebergs break off into the sea.
Credit Ian Joughin / Science/AAAS
Researchers studying Greenland's ice say it is melting more slowlyl than previously thought. Here, ice travels down a relatively small outlet glacier into the sea.
Credit Ian Joughin / Science/AAAS
Massive sections of ice (center front) have broken away from the Jakobshavn glacier into the sea. There's enough water stored in Greenland's glaciers to raise the sea level by 20 feet.
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Originally published on Wed May 23, 2012 9:50 am

A new study has some reassuring news about how fast Greenland's glaciers are melting away.

Greenland's glaciers hold enough water to raise sea level by 20 feet, and they are melting as the planet warms, so there's a lot at stake.

A few years ago, the Jakobshavn glacier in Greenland really caught people's attention. In short order, this slow-moving stream of ice suddenly doubled its speed. It started dumping a whole lot more ice into the Atlantic. Other glaciers also sped up.

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Environment
4:08 pm
Thu April 26, 2012

Countries Losing Steam On Climate Change Initiatives

Credit Lars Baron / Getty Images
Germany plans to take all of its nuclear power plants offline by 2022, which means coal-fired power plants like the Kraftwerk Westfalen, in Hamm, Germany, will be a key component of the country's energy infrastructure.
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Originally published on Thu April 26, 2012 5:27 pm

Energy ministers from around the world met in London this week and got a scolding. The International Energy Agency warned the ministers that they are falling way behind in their efforts to wean the world from dirty sources of energy. Nations are nowhere near being on track to avert significant climate change in the coming decades.

It turns out that right now, just about everything is conspiring to make it harder to clean up the world's energy supply.

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