Professor Boyle is a marine geochemist involved in the study of the oceanic
dispersal of anthropogenic emissions and the evolution of the Earth's climate. He
is interested in the areas of paleoceanography, paleoclimatology, and the
chemistry of environmental waters. His research includes climatological studies
of past ocean circulation patterns based on the fossil chemistry of oceanic
sediments, control of late Pleistocene carbon dioxide pressure by ocean
circulation and chemistry, and trace element variability in polar ice cores. He is
also investigating the trace element chemistry of rivers and estuaries, and the
chemical composition of seawater. In particular, he studies the variability of
oceanic trace metals related to atmospheric transport of anthropogenic
emissions and mineral dust, and the fate of atmospherically transported
pollutant lead in the ocean. He has pioneered development of several new proxy
tracers for paleoenvironmental processes, and was the first to provide a correct
quantitative assessment of chemical changes in the deep ocean that occur during
ice ages. He demonstrated that the deep ocean responded rapidly to changes in
the surface climate during a brief thousand-year reversal of deglaciation, which
occurred 12,900 years ago. He also developed a new model to account for some
of the reduced atmospheric carbon dioxide during glacial times, which is a major
factor in the genesis of glacial climate. He is using the fallout of industrial lead
emissions to document the mechanisms of trace metal transport through the
ocean, has helped determine a record of industrial lead and cadmium emissions
into the western North Atlantic ocean for the past 100 years, and helped develop
proxy tracers which document historical variations in the Pacific basin El
Niño/Southern Oscillation climate fluctuations. Prof. Boyle has been honored as
a Guggenheim Fellow (1991-1992), Fellow of the American Geophysical Union
(1994), Huntsman Award, Bedford Institution of Oceanography (1994),
Geochemistry Fellow, Geochemical Society and European Asociation for
Geochemistry (1998), Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of
Science (1999), Patterson Medal, Geochemical Society (2000), and National
Academy of Sciences (2008).