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).