For Homo sapiens, a dry-land species, discussions of the climate and how it is changing tend to revolve around what is going on in the atmosphere. This is a dangerously parochial attitude, for the atmosphere is but one of two fluid systems circulating above Earth’s solid surface. The other, the ocean, is in many ways the more important of the pair. Ocean circulation redistributes heat and swallows carbon dioxide. Susan Lozier, professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, and Dean and Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Chair of the College of Sciences, spoke about the assumptions many people have about oceans and ocean circulation during the recent American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (AAAS) annual meeting. (This story was also covered in Yahoo!Finance and Science.)