Climate

As our planet warms, the effects of heat on the human body will become important information. The human body is capable of dealing with heat, but reprieves are needed to allow our systems to rest, else our bodies become over-stressed. This reprieve often…

Crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS) are decimating coral populations along the Great Barrier Reef. Scientists have sequenced COTS genomes in the hopes of turning their own biology against them. Researchers think they have found the peptides the COTS use to…

Hurricane Matthew, a category 4 storm, hit Haiti on October 4, 2016 [Image: Hurricane Matthew Hits Haiti/NASA Goddard Space Flight Center under CC-BY licence]In 2012, Hurricane Sandy, the second costliest hurricane in United States history, caused the…

Glacier meltwater provides a steady source of water for communities that would otherwise lack access during the dry season, but melting glaciers can cause problems beyond raising the sea level and endangering coastal communities. Meltwater forms lakes…

Prior to the year 2000, the Earth’s spin axis was slowly drifting toward Canada (green arrow, left image). Melting ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, as well as a drought in Eurasia, resulted in large changes to the mass composition of the…

by Michael R. Gerhardt Our climate is rapidly changing, and many countries are beginning to take action. In the United States, President Barack Obama has announced the Clean Power Plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from electric power generation,…

by Greg Silverberg figures by Kaitlyn Choi Cleantech is a troubled sector Scientists know from geological data that carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere have been below 300 parts per million for nearly 1 million years.  However, for about a…

by Jordan Wilkerson figures by Brad Wierbowski The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently issued a new wave of regulations, and they focus on one thing: methane. Due to the EPA’s recent proposal, we have been inundated with stories about…

by Matthew Schwartz A new danger is threatening the economic stability of the west coast of the United States and has the potential to cause a public health crisis. A massive harmful algal bloom has accumulated across most of the west coast and may be…

Presented by Jacky Austermann Why does sea level change? Everyone knows that sea level rise is a threat to coastal cities, but the mechanisms of why the change happens are less often talked about. In my talk I will explain why sea level is changing, why…