(CNN) Wallace Broecker, the renowned geophysicist who popularized the term "global warming," has died. He was 87.

Broecker died Monday in New York, said Kevin Krajick, a senior science writer at Columbia University's Earth Institute.

Broecker spent many years as a professor at Columbia, and his vast body of work focused on the relationship between oceans, climate and geological time.

Though the term had been used before, Broecker's usage helped push it into the mainstream.

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