The UW College of the Environment is pleased to announce that Nives Dolšak has agreed to serve for a three-year term as director of the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs, effective September 1, 2019.

Dolšak studies how common pool resources are governed. She looks at the role of community action, social capital, market-based instruments, as well as traditional regulatory policies. Her research has examined these issues in the context of Washington State, the United States, Eastern and Central Europe, as well as whole world. A special area of focus is on global climate change policies that have been developed and implemented from the local to international level. Regionally she studies collaborative salmon management through Washington Sea Grant funded research, and serves as a member of the Puget Sound Partnership’s Science Panel.

“I believe that Dolšak is well prepared to navigate the next several years of immediate challenges, and to create a clear and unifying long-term vision for the school that leverages the existing strengths and creates an innovative and strategic framework for future faculty hires, student recruitment and curricular offerings,” said Lisa Graumlich, dean and Mary Laird Wood Professor at the College of the Environment. “The search committee recognized the School of Marine and Environmental Affairs as “a small but sparkling gem,” and I am excited to have the opportunity to work closely with Dolšak to help maintain the rich and rigorous scholarship and education programing in the School within a culture that welcomes and supports all faculty, staff, and students.”

The College would also like to thank Terrie Klinger for her service as the outgoing director.

David Fluharty has generously agreed to take on the role of interim director, effective July 1-August 31, 2019.

Finally, thanks are due to the advisory search committee for their outreach to the marine and environmental affairs community, including Clare Ryan (Committee Chair, Professor, School of Environmental and Forest Sciences), Alison Cullen (Professor, Daniel J. Evans School of Public Policy and Governance), Ryan Kelly (Associate Professor, School of Marine and Environmental Affairs) and Hettie Scofield (Administrator, Department of Atmospheric Sciences).

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US Embassy Santiago, Chile

One of the biggest sources of concern for scientists regarding climate change is the uncertainty surrounding melting ice sheets in the Antarctic causing rising sea levels. New research coauthored by University of Washington Earth and Space Sciences professor Gerard Roe used mathematical analysis and computer models to make projections of future sea levels, pointing to ice sheets growing unstable and flowing into the ocean sooner than expected. Specifically, a state-of-the-art ice sheet model of Thwaites glacier confirms that the glacier is becoming increasingly unstable.

The Thwaites glacier is part of the ice sheet in West Antarctica, and is considered to be the most unstable in the continent. Researchers warn that the glacier could lose all its ice in 150 years, resulting in about half a meter of sea rise. Instabilities hidden within Antarctic ice are likely to accelerate flow into the ocean and push sea levels to rise faster than has been predicted.

CNN, TIME and Forbes cover the study further.

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B Drummond

Congratulations to Atmospheric Sciences‘ Professor Qiang Fu, who was recently awarded the Jule G. Charney Medal from the American Meteorological Society.

This top honor is granted to individuals in recognition of highly significant research or development achievement in the atmospheric or hydrologic sciences. The citation will read, “For pioneering contributions to the theory and practice of atmospheric radiative transfer and its critical linkages to climate and climate change.”

On a nice summer day, clouds can look soft and fluffy and benign, or wispy and thin. But their welcoming appearance belies the significant effects that they can have on the global climate. Those effects are what atmospheric physicist Fu studies, the seriousness of which we are now starting to understand. Using a mix of satellite and ground-based observations along with numerical modeling and theoretical studies, he explores the ways that clouds modulate the radiative energy budget and feedback to climate system, as well as the ways that the dynamics of the upper atmosphere affect climate change. In recognition of his distinguished career, he was elected a Fellow of the American Meteorological Society in 2009, was awarded the Humboldt Research award in 2013, became an American Geophysical Union Fellow in 2014 and became an American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow in 2015.

Congratulations, Professor Fu!

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The University of Washington’s School of Oceanography again is ranked No. 1 in the world on the Global Ranking of Academic Subjects list for 2019. The ranking, released in June, was conducted by researchers at the Center for World-Class Universities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

“The University of Washington is proud to be home to — and a destination for — the top scholars and most promising students in these essential fields of study. Our faculty, teachers and researchers are leading learning and discovery across the UW and we are grateful to be recognized for this important work,” said President Ana Mari Cauce.

The group ranked more than 4,000 universities around the world in 52 subjects across natural sciences, engineering, life sciences, medical sciences and social sciences.

In 2018, the UW was ranked No. 14 on the group’s annual Academic Ranking of World Universities list. This year’s university ranking has not yet been released.

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Dennis Wise/University of Washington

This Saturday will mark a half century since the Apollo 11 mission landed on the moon and two U.S. astronauts, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, walked its surface. At the University of Washington, the NASA-funded Northwest Earth and Space Sciences Pipeline, or NEESP, is marking the occasion with a robotics challenge for middle and high school students from across the state.

“We provide outreach to students across the country so that they will be inspired to contribute to future developments on the ground and into space,” said NESSP director Robert Winglee, a UW professor of Earth and Space Sciences. “As in the Apollo era, innovations being developed for spaceflight have major benefits, often unforeseen at the time, for society.”

The Apollo 50 Next Giant Leap Student Challenge, or ANGLeS Challenge, has attracted 4,000 students from across the country since it launched in January. UW is the regional host for Washington state as well as the national hub for 15 similar events taking place this week across the country. Twenty-eight teams from across Washington have qualified for the finals.

Opening ceremonies will begin Friday at 8:30 a.m. in Kane Hall 130, featuring Rickey Hall, UW’s vice president for Minority Affairs & Diversity, and UW alumna Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger, a retired NASA astronaut.

Teams will complete the challenge throughout the day in Kane Hall 130, while using Mary Gates Hall as a warmup space. The five-member teams of 5^th– through 12^th-grade students hail from Forks to Walla Walla, and from Bellingham to Olympia. The day’s activities also include a STEM career panel and lab tours. All the events are open to the public.

The challenge event is the latest outreach effort from the NESSP, which seeks to attract underrepresented students into space careers.

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Go Iwahana/University of Alaska, Fairbanks

In recent years, the idea of life on other planets has become less far-fetched. NASA announced June 27 that it will send a vehicle to Saturn’s icy moon Titan, a celestial body known to harbor surface lakes of methane and an ice-covered ocean of water, boosting its chance for supporting life.

On Earth, scientists are studying the most extreme environments to learn how life might exist under completely different settings, like on other planets. A University of Washington team has been studying the microbes found in “cryopegs,” trapped layers of sediment with water so salty that it remains liquid at below-freezing temperatures, which may be similar to environments on Mars or other planetary bodies farther from the sun.

At the recent AbSciCon meeting in Bellevue, Washington, researchers presented DNA sequencing and related results to show that brine samples from an Alaskan cryopeg isolated for tens of thousands of years contain thriving bacterial communities. The lifeforms are similar to those found in floating sea ice and in saltwater that flows from glaciers, but display some unique patterns.

“We study really old seawater trapped inside of permafrost for up to 50,000 years, to see how those bacterial communities have evolved over time,” said lead author Zachary Cooper, a UW doctoral student in oceanography.

Cryopegs were first discovered by geologists in Northern Alaska decades ago. This field site in Utqiaġvik, formerly known as Barrow, was excavated in the 1960s by the U.S. Army’s Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory to explore large wedges of freshwater ice that occur in the permafrost there. Subsurface brine was eventually collected from the site in the 2000s.

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