Earth and Atmospheric Science

Nearly 60 years ago a mysterious illness swept through families in fishing villages along Japan’s Minamata Bay. Those affected presented symptoms of a neurological disease: loss of feeling in the limbs, impaired vision, difficulty walking, and trouble…

From Snails Are Dissolving in Pacific Ocean (original article here) Image courtesy of Arctic Exploration 2002, Russ Hopcroft, University of Alaska, Fairbanks, NOAA/OER Recent findings show that CO2 emissions are increasingly acidifying oceans, causing…

Presented by Ethan Butler, Karen McKinnon, Andy Rhines Extreme weather events, from hurricanes to heat waves, seem to be in the news with increasing regularity.But are extreme events actually increasing in frequency? And do they have a connection to our…

Presented by Jessica Kunke, Lei Zhu, Stephen Portillo The natural world is so complex and unpredictable that it might seem math could never be a sufficient tool to understand it.  Our lecture aims to widen this view of math and explore how mathematical…

Presented by Katherine Rosenfeld, Laura Schaefer, Anjali Tripathi For millennia, our understanding of Earth came from our own experiences on the planet. Today, with the ability to observe other planets in the Solar System and planets around other stars,…

Presented by Heather Olins Since their discovery in 1977, scientists and non-scientists alike have been captivated by hydrothermal vent ecosystems. The geological setting and the biological processes that occur in these locations make them unlike any…

Presented by Elizabeth Thomas, Sujit Datta, and Atreyee Bhattacharya During the last three billion years, Earth’s climate has nurtured life. However, records of Earth’s history indicate that climate has changed dramatically with major consequences…

When we think of biodiversity management, or maintaining the species diversity in an area, it’s easy to draw parallels to conservation. However, conservation usually focuses on one or few species at a time. This means that it often doesn’t mesh well with…

A worker fire ant is steadily traversing the landscape looking for a good meal to take back to the nest. Suddenly, it finds a lizard basking in the sun lying directly in its path. Undaunted, the ant goes back to the nearest foraging trail and recruits…

“An inordinate fondness for beetles” is what the celebrated biologist J.B.S. Haldane apocryphally quipped when asked his opinion of God. purchasing levitra Beetles comprise just under a third of the 1.2 million species described so far [], and a recent…