Feature Channels: Environmental Science

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Hummingbirds have the fastest metabolism of any animal. The tropical hummingbirds that live in the Andes Mountains in South America must expend considerable energy to maintain their high body temperatures in cold environments. One tool that they use to survive cold nights is called torpor, a hibernation-like state that allows them to ramp down energy consumption to well below what they normally use during the day.

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The Biden administration has greenlighted ConocoPhillips’ controversial Willow oil drilling project in Alaska. But environmental groups will mount legal challenges to stop it, said University of Miami environmental legal expert Jessica Owley.

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A Secchi disk – historically called a “dinner plate” by sailors – is used in the open ocean to measure concentrations of microscopic algae called phytoplankton.

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In decades past, scientists have been unable to conclusively identify human-associated microbes in samples collected above 26,000 feet. This study marks the first time that next-generation gene sequencing technology has been used to analyze soil from such a high elevation on Mount Everest, enabling researchers to gain new insight into almost everything and anything that’s in them.

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Most insect pheromones are odor molecules containing carbon-carbon double bonds. Such double bonds are known to be easily destroyed by ozone.

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Practical carbon capture technologies are still in the early stages of development, with the most promising involving a class of compounds called amines that can chemically bind with carbon dioxide. In AVS Quantum Science, researchers deploy an algorithm to study amine reactions through quantum computing. An existing quantum computer cab run the algorithm to find useful amine compounds for carbon capture more quickly, analyzing larger molecules and more complex reactions than a traditional computer can.

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A recent study in the Journal of Biological Chemistry has revealed the secret behind an evolutionary marvel: a bacteriophage with an extremely long tail. This extraordinary tail is part of a bacteriophage that lives in inhospitable hot springs and preys on some of the toughest bacteria on the planet.

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Bald Eagles and dairy farmers exist in a mutually beneficial relationship in parts of northwestern Washington State. According to a new study, this "win-win" relationship has been a more recent development, driven by the impact of climate change on eagles' traditional winter diet of salmon carcasses, as well as by increased eagle abundance following decades of conservation efforts.

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We need a better understanding of the particles emitted by wildfires, including how they evolve, so we can improve our predictions of their impacts on climate, climate change, and human health. Atmospheric scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory and collaborating institutions recently published a study that suggests the global climate models aren’t getting the full picture. Their data could change that.

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Tiny particles in Earth’s atmosphere can have a big impact on climate. But understanding exactly how these aerosol particles form cloud drops and affect the absorption and scattering of sunlight is one of the biggest sources of uncertainty in climate models. Ogochukwu (Ogo) Enekwizu is trying to tame that complexity by creating soot-seeded aerosol particles in a lab.

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Government and political institutions should do more to make citizens feel empowered within marine environment decisions and give them the right to participate, new research shows.

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Climate models used by the UN’s IPCC and others to project climate change are not accurately reflecting what the Arctic’s future will be. Researchers at the University of Gothenburg argue that the rate of warming will be much faster than projected.

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Soils deeper than 20 centimeters may account for roughly half of the carbon that soils store overall. Warmer temperatures can stimulate microbial decomposition of this carbon. This study of five years of experimental warming found a significant reduction in the carbon stock stored in deep forest soils, confirming that climate change can increase the release of carbon from soil.

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A new study led by Florida State University researchers found that plants and small organisms in Arctic rivers could be responsible for more than half the particulate organic matter flowing to the Arctic Ocean. That’s a greater proportion than previously estimated, and it has implications for how much carbon gets sequestered in the ocean and how much moves into the atmosphere.

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Growing in the heart of the world’s deepest valley are two plants that have fooled scientists for decades.

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Black widow spiders have earned a fearsome reputation for their venomous bite. But in parts of the southern United States these spiders have much to fear themselves—from spider relatives who really don't like their company.

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The arrival of the new year is a prime time for Antarctic birds like the south polar skua, Antarctic petrel, and snow petrel to build nests and lay their eggs.

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See how CSU field courses provide hands-on​ learning and prepare students for future research careers.

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Greeshma Gadikota, assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering at Cornell University, will partner with Stillwater Critical Minerals to develop environmentally rigorous techniques to help the company extract elements.

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A team of Rutgers scientists dedicated to pinpointing the primordial origins of metabolism – a set of core chemical reactions that first powered life on Earth – has identified part of a protein that could provide scientists clues to detecting planets on the verge of producing life. The research, published in Science Advances, has important implications in the search for extraterrestrial life because it gives researchers a new clue to look for, said Vikas Nanda, a researcher at the Center for Advanced Biotechnology and Medicine (CABM) at Rutgers.

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Domestic production of solar panels – most of which are now made in Asia – can speed up decarbonization in the U.S., according to new Cornell University research published in Nature Communications.

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Nominations are now open for the GCOOS Board of Directors, who help set policy for the Gulf of Mexico's certified ocean observing entity.

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A researcher at Missouri University of Science and Technology was recently tapped by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) to lead a $2 million grant project related to critical minerals and clean energy.

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In the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia, southern resident orcas have experienced no net population growth since the 1970s. But northern resident orcas, with a similar diet and territory, have grown steadily. A new study may help explain why: The two populations differ in how they hunt for salmon, their primary and preferred food source.

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An analysis extending from southern Portugal to northern Norway highlights the importance of temperature in determining where fish species are found.

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Atmospheric rivers, which are long, narrow bands of water vapor, are becoming more intense and frequent with climate change.

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Islands are hotspots for biodiversity – they cover less than 7% of the Earth’s land area, but account for up to 20% of all terrestrial species on the planet. However, islands are also hotspots for species extinction as 50% of today’s IUCN threatened species are native to islands.

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Researchers have discovered early social learning in insects. They found signaling communicated by honey bees about food sources—transmitted through a “waggle dance”—is an intricate form of social learning and one of the most complex known examples of non-human spatial referential communication.

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In new work, PNNL researchers find that 10 gigatons of carbon dioxide may need to be pulled from Earth's atmosphere and oceans annually to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees. A diverse suite of carbon dioxide removal methods will be key.

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A team of polymer chemists in Florida State University’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry is developing a new antifouling coating to keep these sea creatures at bay. The work is funded through a new $510,000 grant from the U.S. Office of Naval Research.

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Tibet is known as the “Water Tower of Asia,” providing water to about 2 billion people and supporting critical ecosystems in High Mountain Asia and the Tibetan Plateau, where many of the largest Asian river systems originate. This region is also one of the areas most vulnerable to the compounding effects of climate change and human activities. Michigan State University researchers are identifying policy changes that need to happen now to prepare for the future impacts projected by climate models.

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It’s a big night for spotted salamanders. Normally secretive and rarely seen, the salamanders emerge by the hundreds from their underground burrows to gather at breeding ponds at Tyson Research Center, Washington University in St. Louis’ environmental field station. Breeding happens on just a handful of days each spring, after the first warm rains fall.

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As millions of tonnes a year of microplastic waste mounts in marine environments, Flinders University scientists warn the ramifications to wildlife, food webs and human health are still little understood.

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Doublet Pool’s regular thumping is more than just an interesting tourist attraction. A new study led by University of Utah researchers shows that the interval between episodes of thumping reflects the amount of energy heating the pool at the bottom, as well as in indication of how much heat is being lost through the surface. Doublet Pool, the authors found, is Yellowstone’s thumping thermometer.

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A global dataset of ocean plastic pollution between 1979 and 2019 reveals a rapid and unprecedented increase in ocean plastics since 2005, according to a study published March 8, 2023 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Marcus Eriksen from The 5 Gyres Institute, USA, and colleagues.

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Coffee is important to the economies of coffee producing regions. A study published in PLOS Climate by Doug Richardson at CSIRO Oceans & Atmosphere, Hobart, Tasmania, Australia and colleagues suggests that climate change may significantly affect land where coffee is cultivated.

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By: Bill Wellock | Published: March 8, 2023 | 10:23 am | SHARE: A new United Nations agreement, informally known as the “High Seas Treaty,” creates a legal framework for managing the parts of the world’s oceans that are outside national boundaries.Discussions over the treaty have been ongoing since 2004. Now that an agreement is drafted, it must be adopted and ratified by UN member states before it takes effect.

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In a newly published paper in the journal Papers in Palaeontology, University of Illinois Chicago’s Roy Plotnick and colleagues report that fossils long-interpreted as jellyfish were anemones. To do so, they simply turned the ancient animals upside down.

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Researchers have begun to explore the underlying neural activity of eating behaviours in fruit flies to better understand the motives that drive feeding.

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Much of the progress made in understanding the scope of bird deaths from building and window collisions has come as the result of citizen science, according to a newly published study. But the study also concludes that such grassroots efforts need more buy-in from government and industry, and better funding so they can keep a foot on the gas in their efforts to reduce bird-window collisions.

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The injection of bubbles from waves breaking in turbulent and cold high-latitude regions of the high seas is an underappreciated way in which atmospheric gases are transported into the interior ocean. An improved mechanistic understanding of gas exchange in high latitudes is important for several reasons, including to better constrain climate models that are used to predict changes in the ocean inventory of key gases like oxygen and carbon dioxide.