Nighttime heat waves are becoming more frequent in western Washington and Oregon.
And if you don’t sleep well in hot weather, this might be a good time to buy a fan, since records show that on average heat waves tend to strike around the last week of July.
University of Washington research shows that the region west of the Cascades saw only three nighttime heat waves between 1901 and 1980, but that number quadrupled to 12 nighttime heat waves in the three decades after 1980, according to a paper published in the July issue of the Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology. (more…)
ANN ARBOR — In events that could exacerbate sea level rise over the coming decades, stretches of ice on the coasts of Antarctica and Greenland are at risk of rapidly cracking apart and falling into the ocean, according to new iceberg calving simulations from the University of Michigan.
“If this starts to happen and we’re right, we might be closer to the higher end of sea level rise estimates for the next 100 years,” said Jeremy Bassis, assistant professor of atmospheric, oceanic and space sciences at the U-M College of Engineering, and first author of a paper on the new model published in the current issue of Nature Geoscience. (more…)
A chemical analysis of oil sheens found floating recently at the ocean’s surface near the site of the Deepwater Horizon disaster indicates that the source is pockets of oil trapped within the wreckage of the sunken rig. Both the Macondo well and natural oil seeps common to the Gulf of Mexico were confidently ruled out.
Researchers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) used a recently-patented method to fingerprint the chemical makeup of the sheens and to estimate the location of the source based on the extent to which gasoline-like compounds evaporated from the oil sheens. The study was published online in Environmental Science & Technology. (more…)
Despite the wide-held perception that Christians have become more concerned about the environment, new research finds this so-called “greening of Christianity” is not evident among the religious rank-and-file.(more…)
New research from the University of Exeter and King’s College London has shown how a population of brown trout can survive in the contaminated waters of the River Hayle in Cornwall where metal concentrations are so high they would be lethal to fish from unpolluted sites.(more…)
Officers of the Indian Forest Service (IFS) arrived on the Yale campus July 21 for a two-week training session on state-of-the-art concepts and practices in forestry and environmental management. The session is part of a partnership between the Global Institute of Sustainable Forestry at Yale, TERI University (The Energy and Resources Institute in India), and the Indira Gandhi National Forest Academy acting under the auspices of the Indian Ministry of Environment and Forests.
The Indian Ministry of Environment and Forests conceived the idea of holding short, intensive training sessions as a way of injecting fresh ideas, tools, and techniques into its forest service. The Yale Global Institute has participated from the beginning of the program, making this the fourth year, and the sixth group of Indian foresters welcomed to campus. (more…)
At the end of the last Ice Age, as the world began to warm, a swath of the North Pacific Ocean came to life. During a brief pulse of biological productivity 14,000 years ago, this stretch of the sea teemed with phytoplankton, amoeba-like foraminifera and other tiny creatures, who thrived in large numbers until the productivity ended—as mysteriously as it began—just a few hundred years later.
Researchers have hypothesized that iron sparked this surge of ocean life, but a new study led by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) scientists and colleagues at the University of Bristol (UK), the University of Bergen (Norway), Williams College and the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University suggests iron may not have played an important role after all, at least in some settings. The study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, determines that a different mechanism—a transient “perfect storm” of nutrients and light—spurred life in the post-Ice Age Pacific. Its findings resolve conflicting ideas about the relationship between iron and biological productivity during this time period in the North Pacific—with potential implications for geo-engineering efforts to curb climate change by seeding the ocean with iron. (more…)
Oceanography graduate student lands scholarship supporting wetland research
Growing up along Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans, Brandon Boyd spent a lot of time hunting for waterfowl and fishing for speckled trout in marshes and swamps. There, wetlands are a way of life.
