Feature Channels: Environmental Science

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Global Temperature Report: January 2013.

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The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center of The University of Texas at Austin has been selected to grow 700,000-plus loblolly pines to restore wildfire-damaged Bastrop County, home of the endangered Houston toad.

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Columbia Engineering and Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing that certain volatile organic gases can promote cloud formation in a way never considered before by atmospheric scientists. They say this is the first time gases have been shown to affect cloud formation in this way and will “improve our ability to model cloud formation, an important component of climate.”

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EarthViewer, a free, interactive app designed for the iPad, lets users explore the Earth’s history with the touch of a finger by scrolling through 4.5 billion years of geological evolution.

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Broadening of forest-centric focus to river catchment-based conservation framework is required: A study published in Conservation Letters this week found that freshwater ecosystems in the Amazon are highly vulnerable to environmental degradation. River, lake and wetland ecosystems—encompassing approximately one-fifth of the Amazon basin area—are being increasingly degraded by deforestation, pollution, construction of dams and waterways, and over-harvesting of plant and animal species.

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A worldwide review of global rainfall data led by the University of Adelaide has found that the intensity of the most extreme rainfall events is increasing across the globe as temperatures rise.

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A hole in the Antarctic ozone layer has changed the way that waters in the southern oceans mix, a situation that has the potential to alter the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and eventually could have an impact on global climate change.

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A new study from researchers at the University of Florida and Yale University suggest that some organisms, such as manatees, polar bears or cheetahs, may be in for a rough time as they try to adapt to climate change.

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Working beneath the towering oaks and maples on the University of Michigan's central campus Diag, undergraduate researchers and their faculty adviser helped explain an observation that had puzzled insect ecologists who study voracious leaf-munching gypsy moth caterpillars.

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What makes ice, heats water and reduces a university's carbon footprint? Michigan Tech's new environmentally conscious ice-making system at its John J. MacInnes Student Ice Arena.

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Surrounded by mining, the mountainous region of Potosi, Bolivia is plagued by extensive environmental contamination from past and current mining operations. Researchers have discovered a technique to remove pollutants from water that requires minimal labor costs and is powered by nature itself.

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Chemicals found in common household items are proving to be the right formula to safely extract up to 70 percent of oil still embedded in high-salt oil reservoirs in the United States. A team from the University of Oklahoma Institute for Applied Surfactant Research has formulated an environmentally sound compound that increases oil flow in previously pumped reservoirs.

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Researchers from Oklahoma State University use soil water deficits to create a "calendar" of seasonal drought patterns.

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The Woods Hole Research Center (WHRC) is proud to name the former Prime Minister of Norway—Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland—as the 2013 recipient of the Lawrence S. Huntington Environmental Prize.

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In what is believed to be the first study of its kind, researchers used genomic techniques to document the presence of significant numbers of living microorganisms – principally bacteria – in the middle and upper troposphere, that section of the atmosphere approximately four to six miles above the Earth’s surface.

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The American public can expect to add earlier and more severe flu seasons to the fallout from climate change, according to a research study published online Jan. 28 in PLOS Currents: Influenza.

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The heat generated by everyday energy consumption in metropolitan areas is significant enough to influence the character of major atmospheric circulation systems, including the jet stream during winter months, and cause continental-scale surface warming in high latitudes.

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Even if you live more than 1,000 miles from the nearest large city, it could be affecting your weather. New research shows that the heat generated by everyday activities in metropolitan areas influences major atmospheric systems, raising and lowering temperatures over thousands of miles.

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There’s a well-known saying in New England that if you don’t like the weather here, wait a minute. When it comes to independent voters, those weather changes can just as quickly shift beliefs about climate change.

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University of Adelaide geologists have shed new light on the origin of Australia’s largest delta, the Ceduna Delta, and the river systems which drained the continent millions of years before the Murray-Darling system came into existence.

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Warmer temperatures due to climate change could cause soils to release additional carbon into the atmosphere, thereby enhancing climate change – but that effect diminishes over the long term, finds a study that could improve predictions of how climate warming will affect the carbon dioxide flux from soils.

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Melting Arctic sea ice is no longer just evidence of a rapidly warming planet— it’s also part of the problem.

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A new study currently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science provides the first global quantitative assessment of land and water “grabbing” for food production by wealthier nations in generally poorer countries.

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In the coming decades, climate change will lead to more frequent and more intense Midwest heat waves while degrading air and water quality and threatening public health. Intense rainstorms and floods will become more common, and existing risks to the Great Lakes will be exacerbated.

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A team of researchers led by Professor Maharaj K. Pandit from the University Scholars Programme at the National University of Singapore (NUS) found that unprecedented dam building in the Indian Himalaya holds serious consequences for biodiversity and could pose a threat to human lives and livelihoods.

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With record-breaking warm spring weather in 2010 and 2012 resulting in the earliest known flowering times in 161 years of recorded history in two U.S. locations, according to a new Boston University-initiated study published today, scientists now are pondering if at some point plants will be unable to successfully keep adapting to a changing climate.

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Using the meticulous phenological records of two iconic American naturalists, Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold, scientists have demonstrated that native plants in the eastern United States are flowering as much as a month earlier in response to a warming climate.

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Major hydropower dams in the northeastern United States, constructed with state-of-the-art features designed to allow migratory fish to pass through them on their way to spawn upstream, have failed in that regard, according to a study published today in the journal Conservation Letters.

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Innovative approach to managing tanks improves environmental outcomes, stretches scarce resources.

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While 2012 was the ninth warmest year globally, it was the warmest year on record for both the contiguous 48 U.S. states and for the continental U.S. For the U.S., 2012 started with one of the three warmest Januaries in the 34-year record, and saw a record-setting March heat wave.

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In addition to causing smoggy skies and chronic coughs, soot – or black carbon – is the number two contributor to global warming.

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Salmon runs are notoriously variable: strong one year, and weak the next. New research shows that the same may be true from one century to the next.

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Environmental mood swings determine the sustainable yield of most fish populations.

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By examining a set of fossil corals that are as much as 7,000 years old, scientists have dramatically expanded the amount of information available on the El Nino-Southern Oscillation, a Pacific Ocean climate cycle that affects climate worldwide.

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Samantha Borisoff, a climatologist in Cornell University’s Northeast Regional Climate Center, is reviewing temperature data for 2012 from throughout the 12-state region. She has discovered that for most major sites – including Washington, D.C., Boston, Philadelphia and New York City – it was the hottest year ever recorded.

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In a report published today (Dec. 31, 2012) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison reports a rising threat to the whitebark pine forests of the northern Rocky Mountains as native mountain pine beetles climb ever higher, attacking trees that have not evolved strong defenses to stop them.

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The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) announced today significant progress for tigers in three key landscapes across the big cat’s range due to better law enforcement, protection of habitat, and strong government partnerships.

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Raising further concerns about sea level rise, a study finds that the West Antarctica Ice Sheet is warming nearly twice as much as previously thought. The study, which will appear in Nature Geoscience, finds an increase of 4.3 degrees Fahrenheit since 1958 – three times faster than the global average.

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In a discovery that raises further concerns about the future contribution of Antarctica to sea level rise, a new study finds that the western part of the ice sheet is experiencing nearly twice as much warming as previously thought.

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Phragmites australis is an invasive species also known as common reed. It grows fast and high and poses an extreme threat to the Great Lakes' coastal wetlands. Now scientists have used satellite data to map the location of Phragmites. This should help those who are working to manage the invasive reed and prevent its spread.

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Baylor University researchers are one step closer to understanding the algae that causes a substantial number of fish deaths in more than 18 states.

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In the rain forests of the Congo, where mammals and birds are hunted to near-extinction, an impenetrable sound of buzzing insects blankets the atmosphere.

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The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said this month that 2012 "appears virtually certain" to surpass 1998 as the warmest year on record in the contiguous United States. December 2012 temperatures would need to be more than a degree Fahrenheit below the coldest December (1983) for 2012 to miss setting the record, according to NOAA.

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The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) lauded U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazars announcement of a final management plan for the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A) that balances wildlife conservation and energy development in the biggest public landscape in the country. The Integrated Activity Plan and Final Environmental Impact Statement (Final IAP/EIS) issued today by the Bureau of Land Management is the first comprehensive land management plan ever developed for the NPR-A.

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A University of Iowa law professor is proposing the International Monetary Fund as a model for a global structure to govern geoengineering efforts to reduce the harm caused by climate change.

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The future landscape of the American Midwest could look a lot like the past—covered in native grasslands rather than agricultural crops. This is not a return to the past, however, but a future that could depend on grasslands for biofuels, grazing systems, carbon sequestration, and other ecosystem services. A major threat to this ecosystem is an old one—weeds and their influence on the soil.

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Computer scientists at the University of California, San Diego have built a small fleet of portable pollution sensors that allow users to monitor air quality in real time on their smart phones. The sensors could be particularly useful to people suffering from chronic conditions, such as asthma, who need to avoid exposure to pollutants.

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Microorganisms – more than 100 times more kinds than reported just four months ago – are leaping the biggest gap on the planet. Hitching rides in the upper troposphere, they’re making their way from Asia across the Pacific to North America.

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A comprehensive map three years in the making is telling the story of humans’ impact on the Great Lakes, identifying how “environmental stressors” stretching from Minnesota to Ontario are shaping the future of an ecosystem that contains 20 percent of the world’s fresh water.