What Scientists Wish They Knew

We just wish we could see the plumbing.

Very, very hard to predict.

What we need to be able to do now is detect them in real time.

We don't really know how it's going to happen.

There are a lot of places in the deep ocean that we have never seen.

We don't know what's down there.

It's the pace of warming that is the problem.

We like to think of scientists as people who have the answers.

But what of the most important questions are the ones we still can't answer? How do volcanoes really work beneath the surface? Can we predict the next tsunami, rogue wave, or rapidly intensifying hurricane? What is happening in the deepest parts of our oceans? And how quickly is our changing climate going to reshape the planet?

What do you wish you knew?

That question is at the heart of Dr. Ellen Prager's work and this conversation.

Because science doesn't begin with what we know.

It begins with what we don't know.

Almost all of them said what keeps me up at night is not the unknowns.

What keeps me up at night is the knowns and people not understanding and preparing for it.

Today we're going to explore the mysteries scientists are still trying to solve and the knowledge we already have that could help us prepare for what's coming next.

I'm meteorologist Emily Gracie, and this is Atmosphere, a podcast where science becomes conversation.

Each week, I sit down with the experts behind the forecasts, the research, and the headlines to explore not just the science, but the human stories behind it.

Through natural curiosity, we're making science more understandable, more relatable, and hopefully bringing a little more comfort in how we experience the world around us.