Brown Bag Lecture Series; Center for Student Engagement & Leadership; and Arts, Culture, and Civic Engagement Apr. 11, 2013: In honor of Earth Month: Peter D. Ward, Ph.D., is a paleontologist and professor of Geological Sciences at the University of Washington. Ward specializes in the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event (the one that killed the dinosaurs), the…
Presented by James Zachos, Ph.D., University of California at Santa Cruz, at the 2013 Metcalf Institute Annual Public Lecture Series, June 13, 2013. Related Long-term legacy of massive carbon input to the Earthsystem: Anthropocene versus Eocene
Historic flooding across large portions of Central and Eastern Colorado has caused an unprecedented amount of damage. Along with the rise in water levels came elevated concern over the tens of thousands of frack wells that scar the region’s landscape. In one of the hardest hit areas, Weld County, there are over 20,000 frack wells…
Colorado flooding forces thousands more evacuations http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57602779/colorado-flooding-forces-thousands-more-evacuations/ “Biblical” rains trigger flooding that kills 3 in Colo. Live coverage of Colorado flooding from KUSA-TV
Via ESA, 11 September 2013: Offering new insights into our fragile polar regions, ESA’s CryoSat mission has provided three consecutive years of Arctic sea-ice thickness measurements, which show that the ice continues to thin. Although satellites have witnessed a downward trend in the extent of sea ice over the last two decades, it is essential to…
Via Phys.org September 11, 2013: Global warming could impact the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), altering the cycles of El Niño and La Niña events that bring extreme drought and flooding to Australia and many other Pacific-rim countries. New research published in Nature Geoscience using coral samples from Kiribati has revealed how the ENSO cycle has changed…
Video: What Lies Beneath: NASA Antarctic Sub Goes Subglacial NASA / JPL February 28, 2013: When researcher Alberto Behar from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., joined an international Antarctic expedition last month on a trek to investigate a subglacial lake, he brought with him a unique instrument designed and funded by NASA to help…
A 2007 Royal Society paper by NASA scientist Drew Shindell: “… the rarity of palaeoclimate evidence for hydrate-induced climate changes argues that this is a fairly unlikely candidate for near-term sudden climate change. Unlike the others, however, anthropogenic climate change may alter the probability of hydrate release when compared with the past, making the overall…
Excerpts from an episode of History Channel’s “Mega Disasters” series. This explores the paper published by Northwestern University’s Gregory Ryskin. His thesis: the oceans can produce massive eruptions of explosive methane gas. Methane distribution in the water column: Once released into the water column, methane is distributed by currents and aerobic methane oxidation by bacteria…