The UW College of the Environment is pleased to announce that Eric Steig has agreed to serve as chair of the Department of Earth and Space Sciences (ESS), effective February 1, 2020, through June 30, 2023.

Steig is a glaciologist and isotope geochemist who studies how the climate behaved in the past to learn what it can tell us both about the effects of climate change today, and how it will change in the future. He uses ice core records to study climate variability over thousands of years. He works on the geological history and dynamics of ice sheets, as well as on aspects of atmospheric chemistry, and develops novel laboratory research tools in isotope geochemistry. He is the founding co-director of ISOLAB, a state-of-the art isotope geochemistry facility involving research ranging from climate, atmospheric chemistry and neotectonics, to geobiology, aquatic science and fisheries. In addition to his research and teaching, he is committed to fostering greater public understanding of the effects of climate change, and is a founding member of RealClimate.org.

The College would also like to thank Ken Creager for his service as the outgoing director.

“Ken has been a calm and thoughtful contributor to our deliberations and I am particularly appreciative of his work to harness the imagination and energy of the ESS faculty in strategic planning for the future of the department,” said Lisa Graumlich, dean and Mary Laird Wood Professor at the College of the Environment.

Thanks are also due to the advisory search committee for their outreach to the Earth and Space Sciences community, energy and thoughtfulness, including Tim Essington (Committee Chair, Professor, School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences), Curtis Deutsch (Professor, School of Oceanography), Kate Huntington (Professor, Department of Earth and Space Sciences) and Joe Kobayashi (Academic Advisor, Marine Biology Program).

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Michelle Ma/University of Washington

All plants and animals need suitable conditions to survive. That means a certain amount of light, a tolerable temperature range, and access to sources of food, water and shelter.

Many of the existing efforts to protect plant and animal species across the United States rely on information about where these species currently live. For example, if a rare bird species such as the snowy plover is found in a specific location along the Washington coast, conservationists try to protect it from human development where it lives.

But as climate change disrupts the status quo, most animals and plants will need to move to cooler or otherwise more suitable environments to survive. How does this affect efforts to protect biodiversity?

A new study by the University of Washington and The Evergreen State College analyzes whether accounting for climate change in conservation planning can protect future biodiversity more effectively than current approaches, and what the costs of implementing these solutions might be. The authors found that many species of animals and plants likely will need to migrate under climate change, and that conservation efforts will also need to shift to be effective. The paper published Jan. 27 in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

“We are going to need to protect different places if we want to protect biodiversity in the future,” said lead author Joshua Lawler, a UW professor in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences. “We need to think about where species will go as the climate changes, and then plan for that. The business-as-usual planning process isn’t going to work.”

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Very occasionally, Earth gets bombarded by a large meteorite. But every day, our planet gets pelted by space dust, micrometeorites that collect on Earth’s surface.

A University of Washington team looked at very old samples of these small meteorites to show that the grains could have reacted with carbon dioxide on their journey to Earth. Previous work suggested the meteorites ran into oxygen, contradicting theories and evidence that the Earth’s early atmosphere was virtually devoid of oxygen. The new study was published this week in the open-access journal Science Advances.

“Our finding that the atmosphere these micrometeorites encountered was high in carbon dioxide is consistent with what the atmosphere was thought to look like on the early Earth,” said first author Owen Lehmer, a UW doctoral student in Earth and space sciences.

At 2.7 billion years old, these are the oldest known micrometeorites. They were collected in limestone in the Pilbara region of Western Australia and fell during the Archean eon, when the sun was weaker than today. A 2016 paper by the team that discovered the samples suggested they showed evidence of atmospheric oxygen at the time they fell to Earth.

That interpretation would contradict current understandings of our planet’s early days, which is that oxygen rose during the “Great Oxidation Event,” almost half a billion years later.

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Microsoft announced University of Washington School of Oceanography Assistant Professor Alison Gray as one of the winners of the inaugural Microsoft Investigator Fellowship, which empowers researchers of all disciplines who plan to make an impact with research and teaching using the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform. Each fellowship provides $100,000 annually for two years and various training and community events.

Gray is an oceanographer who studies the circulation of the ocean and its impact on the physics and chemistry of the climate system. She uses observations from many different sources, including profiling floats, gliders, satellites, and ships, to investigate the dynamics of ocean circulation on a variety of scales. Her research also aims to improve our understanding of the interactions between ocean circulation and global biogeochemical cycles.

“With the use of modern cloud computing via Azure, my research will be able to take advantage of the vast quantities of global ocean data now being generated, enabling us to tackle important scientific questions in new and exciting ways,” says Gray.

Using the cloud computing and machine learning capabilities of Microsoft Azure, Gray will produce high-resolution four-dimensional estimates of key ocean biological and chemical properties from Biogeochemical-Argo observations — properties including pH, oxygen, nitrate and chlorophyll — on an unparalleled scale and in near-real-time. This project will be the first to establish an optimal artificial intelligence framework to model the irregular, relatively sparse data produced by these instruments. The resulting estimates will be updated monthly and distributed freely online, allowing this information to be easily and effectively used by the scientific community, resource managers and stakeholders at the local, national and international levels, as well as the greater public.

A central focus of this project will be the training of one graduate student and one undergraduate student at the UW, who will gain hands-on experience in oceanographic data analysis, machine learning and cloud computing.

“This sounds like an interesting opportunity to learn from other people in the fellowship, who come from a wide array of fields. I’m looking forward to learning about machine learning, computing and artificial intelligence,” Gray says.

Full list of winners and more information about the fellowship is available in Microsoft’s release.

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University of Washington

Nearly half of the fish caught worldwide are from stocks that are scientifically monitored and, on average, are increasing in abundance. Effective management appears to be the main reason these stocks are at sustainable levels or successfully rebuilding.

That is the main finding of an international project led by the University of Washington to compile and analyze data from fisheries around the world. The results were published Jan. 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“There is a narrative that fish stocks are declining around the world, that fisheries management is failing and we need new solutions — and it’s totally wrong,” said lead author Ray Hilborn, a professor in the UW School of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences. “Fish stocks are not all declining around the world. They are increasing in many places, and we already know how to solve problems through effective fisheries management.”

The project builds on a decade-long international collaboration to assemble estimates of the status of fish stocks — or distinct populations of fish — around the world. This information helps scientists and managers know where overfishing is occurring, or where some areas could support even more fishing. Now the team’s database includes information on nearly half of the world’s fish catch, up from about 20% represented in the last compilation in 2009.

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