Category Archives: Environment

Desert Dust Reduces Colorado River Flow

Dark-colored dust that settles on snow in the Upper Colorado River Basin makes the snow melt early and robs the Colorado River of about 5 percent of its water each year, says a new study co-authored by researchers from the University of Colorado at Boulder-based Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, or CIRES. (more…)

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Great Lakes Water Quality is Focus of New $5-Million Grant

ANN ARBOR, Mich.— How could climate change and our response to it affect the Great Lakes’ water quality? That’s the primary question a team of 27 researchers from across the University of Michigan and collaborators at other institutions will answer with a new $5-million grant from the National Science Foundation. (more…)

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SOS – Save Our Sharks

It is the opposite of biting the hand that feeds you. This time around, it is a group of people who have been victims of shark bites campaigning to save this endangered animal: every year around seventy-three million sharks are slaughtered.

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Optimizing Climate Change Reduction

Palo Alto, CA Scientists at the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology have taken a new approach on examining a proposal to fix the warming planet. So-called geoengineering ideas—large-scale projects to change the Earth’s climate—have included erecting giant mirrors in space to reflect solar radiation, injecting aerosols of sulfate into the stratosphere making a global sunshade, and much more. Past modeling of the sulfate idea looked at how the stratospheric aerosols might affect Earth’s climate and chemistry. (more…)

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Arctic Sea Ice Reaches Lowest 2010 Extent, Third Lowest in Satellite Record

The Arctic sea ice cover appears to have reached its minimum extent for the year, the third-lowest recorded since satellites began measuring sea ice extent in 1979, according to the University of Colorado at Boulder’s National Snow and Ice Data Center.

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Study Adds Clue to How Last Ice Age Ended

As the last ice age was ending, about 13,000 years ago, a final blast of cold hit Europe, and for a thousand years or more, it felt like the ice age had returned.  But oddly, despite bitter cold winters in the north, Antarctica was heating up. For the two decades since ice core records revealed […]

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