A Window Into Climate Change Comes to Mercer Street

Courant professor David Holland, director of NYU's Center for Atmosphere Ocean Science, has an unusual ground-floor lab at the southeast corner of Mercer St. and Washington Place. Pedestrians wandering by frequently peer in through its windows to stare at the spinning contraption inside—a scale model of the planet with a rotating fluid table that mimics the movement of the Earth's oceans.

What they might not realize is that it's all part of predicting the effects of climate change.

In this video, Holland gives a tour of the lab and connects experiments there to his field work in Greenland and Antarctica, where he studies how melting glaciers contribute to rising global sea levels.