Alaskan waters are a critical fishery for salmon. Complex marine food webs underlie and sustain this fishery, and scientists want to know how climate change is reshaping them. But finding samples from the past isn’t easy. “We have to really open our minds and get creative about what can act as an ecological data source,” said Natalie Mastick, currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University.
Read more at UW News »In the Field: UW researchers travel to capture total solar eclipse
On Monday, large parts of the United States will experience a total solar eclipse. This eclipse is expected to be a more significant event than the one in 2017, and the next one visible from the U.S. won’t happen until 2044. The sky will darken in Uvalde, Texas, just seconds before 2:30 p.m. Eastern Time (1:30 p.m. local time in Texas) on April 8.
Read more at UW News »Enrollment at UW College of the Environment continues to climb
The UW College of the Environment has experienced tremendous growth in undergraduate student majors since its inception 15 years ago, with most of that growth coming in recent years. In the 2011-12 academic year, the College enrolled nearly 1,050 undergraduate students across seven different majors offered throughout the College. Fast forward to the current academic year, and there are nearly 1,900 students enrolled in eight majors (Marine Biology was added as a major in 2018-19).
Read more at KING 5 »Video: UW cherry blossoms in peak bloom
The cherry trees on the UW Quad have reached their prime. A group of students in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences has been monitoring the timing of blossoms across campus since 2018, with the goal of creating a model that will use weather data to predict the timing of peak bloom in future years.
Read more at UW News »Shallow soda lakes show promise as cradles of life on Earth
Charles Darwin proposed that life could have emerged in a “warm little pond” with the right cocktail of chemicals and energy. A new study from the University of Washington reports that a shallow “soda lake” in western Canada shows promise for matching those requirements. The findings provide new support that life could have emerged from lakes on the early Earth, roughly 4 billion years ago.
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