Newly documented population of polar bears in Southeast Greenland sheds light on the species’ future in a warming Arctic
Thomas W. Johansen/NASA Oceans Melting Greenland
A Southeast Greenland polar bear on glacier, or freshwater, ice at 61 degrees north in September 2016.
Scientists have documented a previously unknown subpopulation of polar bears living in Southeast Greenland. The polar bears survive with limited access to sea ice by hunting from freshwater ice that pours into the ocean from Greenland’s glaciers. Because this isolated population is genetically distinct and uniquely adapted to its environment, studying it could shed light on the future of the species in a warming Arctic.
“We wanted to survey this region because we didn’t know much about the polar bears in Southeast Greenland, but we never expected to find a new subpopulation living there,” said lead author Kristin Laidre, a polar scientist at the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory. “We knew there were some bears in the area from historical records and Indigenous knowledge. We just didn’t know how special they were.”
The study, published in the June 17 issue of Science, combines seven years of new data collected along the southeastern coast of Greenland with 30 years of historical data from the island’s whole east coast. The remote Southeast region had been poorly studied because of its unpredictable weather, jagged mountains and heavy snowfall. The newly collected genetic, movement and population data show how these bears use glacier ice to survive with limited access to sea ice.
College faculty, staff and students honored at the 2022 Awards of Excellence
Each year, the University of Washington’s Awards of Excellence highlight alumni, faculty, staff, retirees and students who contribute to the richness and diversity of the University community. This year, the University has recognized the outstanding contributions of four members of the College of the Environment: Mikelle Nuwer, Kristin Privitera-Johnson, Burlyn Birkemeier and Joanna Long. The winners will be honored from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. on June 9 at the Meany Hall for the Performing Arts.
Please join us in congratulating our 2022 Awards of Excellence recipients, and thanking them for their amazing work!
Distinguished Teaching Award
UW Oceanography Associate Teaching Professor Mikelle Nuwer
Congratulations to UW Oceanography Associate Teaching Professor Mikelle Nuwer, recipient of a 2022 Distinguished Teaching Award. Award recipients are chosen based on a variety of criteria, including mastery of the subject matter, enthusiasm and innovation in teaching and learning process, ability to engage students both within and outside the classroom, ability to inspire independent and original thinking in students and to stimulate students to do creative work, and innovations in course and curriculum design.
Mikelle has a deep love for her teaching subject — and it shows. Each year, she introduces more than 600 students to marine science, including Pacific Northwest geologic history, the physics and chemistry of coastal waters, and marine food webs and ecology. Her students say that she challenges them while creating a space where questions are welcome, support is available, science is impactful and students can see ways to make a difference. Mikelle developed an evidence-based teaching course for oceanography teaching assistants, coalescing a community of dedicated graduate students with this effort. She chairs her school’s diversity, equity and inclusion committee, and with her graduate students, she has dug deep into inclusive pedagogy that incorporates English learning access, diverse representation in course materials and universal design.
Excellence in Teaching Award
Aquatic and Fishery Sciences Doctoral Candidate Kristin Privitera-Johnson
Congratulations to UW Aquatic and Fishery Sciences Doctoral Candidate Kristin Privitera-Johnson, recipient of a 2022 Excellence in Teaching Award. The award recognizes stellar teaching by graduate students. The recipients are honored for demonstrating extraordinary teaching ability as graduate instructors or as graduate teaching assistants.
In the College, Kristin is respected as equal parts “killer programmer” and “passionate instructor.” She teaches introduction to R programming and advanced R programming courses for natural scientists, and recently developed the course Dark Side of Hot Topics: The Settler-Colonial and White Supremacist History of Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, which colleagues describe as “transformative.” Her deliberate, structured curriculum and course design have created a truly inclusive space where students are free to try, fail and try again. “She is genuine and honest,” a colleague wrote, “and always willing to share her own learning challenges and how she overcame them. Her approach is highly effective and is helping pave the way for our faculty to develop their own adaptive and self-reflective approaches to teaching.”
Together We Will Awards
Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean and Ecosystem Studies Research Scientist Burlyn Birkemeier
This year, two staff members were recognized for their contributions to the College and University; congratulations to Burlyn Birkemeier and Joanna Long. The Together We Will Awards celebrate outstanding staff contributions made during our community’s recent extraordinary challenges.
Cooperative Institute for Climate, Ocean and Ecosystem Studies (CICOES) Research Scientist Burlyn Birkemeier’s contributions as a member of the Health and Safety Committee and the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) Outreach Subcommittee, and as a supervisor, had a great impact on the CICOES community and team. As a member of the DEI subcommittee, she played an integral role in initiatives to help scientists engage with people in the Seattle area from groups that have been underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. In her role as a marine mammal researcher, Burlyn’s performance has remained outstanding despite the challenging year, during which she cheerfully took on new responsibilities even as she continued conducting cutting-edge research.
UW Botanic Gardens Gardner Joanna Long
UW Botanic Gardens Gardner Joanna Long is known as reliable and trustworthy and helps improve her colleagues’ working conditions. She supports her coworkers in a range of ways, from creating development strategies to increasing the life and productivity of equipment to suggesting cards for injured colleagues and consistently advocating for diversity in the hiring process. At the outset of the pandemic, she searched for ways to enable her coworkers to safely enjoy the warmth indoors during the winter months, and her championing of safe protocols led to important changes in the return-to-campus plan.
New study: 2021 heat wave created ‘perfect storm’ for shellfish die-off
Blair Paul
Dead oysters seen along a shoreline in Washington state, following a record heat wave in summer 2021.
It’s hard to forget the excruciating heat that blanketed the Pacific Northwest in late June 2021. Temperatures in Oregon, Washington and British Columbia soared to well above 100 degrees Fahrenheit, with Seattle setting an all-time heat record of 108 degrees on June 28.
During the heat wave, also called a heat dome, scientists and community members alike noticed a disturbing uptick of dying and dead shellfish on some beaches in Washington and British Columbia, both in the Salish Sea and along the outer coast. The observers quickly realized they were living through an unprecedented event and they organized to document the shellfish die-offs as they happened in real time.
Now, a team led by the University of Washington has compiled and analyzed hundreds of these field observations to produce the first comprehensive report of the impacts of the 2021 heat wave on shellfish. The researchers found that many shellfish were victims of a “perfect storm” of factors that contributed to widespread death: The lowest low tides of the year occurred during the year’s hottest days — and at the warmest times of day. The results were published online June 20 in the journal Ecology.
“You really couldn’t have come up with a worse scenario for intertidal organisms,” said lead author Wendel Raymond, a research scientist at UW Friday Harbor Laboratories. “This analysis has given us a really good general picture of how shellfish were impacted by the heat wave, but we know this isn’t even the full story.”
Q&A: Healthier soil leads to more-nutritious food, argues new book by UW geomorphologist David Montgomery
During the pandemic lockdown, many people were dabbling in urban farming or growing houseplants. University of Washington geomorphologist David Montgomery was exploring a deeper topic: How do practices that rebuild soil health affect the quality of the food that comes from that soil?
His new book, “What Your Food Ate,” released June 21 from W.W. Norton & Company and co-authored by Anne Biklé, explores this question. It ties together many previous threads in Montgomery’s work on how practices that preserve the soil are better in the long run. The book also questions the exclusive focus on organic certification for the use of pesticides, versus farming practices that build healthier crops and livestock from below.
UW News asked Montgomery, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences and a winner of the MacArthur “Genius” Award, about the book and his continuing journey to chart a new way to view humanity’s relationship with the land.
Q&A with Amy Snover, outgoing director of the UW Climate Impacts Group
B Drummond
Amy Snover, director of Climate Impacts Group.
For over a quarter of a century, the UW Climate Impacts Group has blended science and decision-making to help the Pacific Northwest region prepare for a changing climate. For the past 10 of those years, director Amy Snover has been at the helm.
Snover recently announced that she will retire on June 15 and plans to travel and spend time outdoors with her husband. Jason Vogel will act as interim director, and four senior staff members — Vogel, Meade Krosby, Guillaume Mauger and Crystal Raymond — will together carry out Snover’s duties until a new director is hired in the fall.
Snover’s impact on the local community isn’t going unnoticed: King County declared June 7, 2022, as “Amy Snover Day” and celebrated at the Washington Park Arboretum. During her last week on campus, UW News sat down with Snover to reflect on what she’s learned in almost 25 years of climate preparedness work.
Including all types of emissions shortens timeline to reach Paris Agreement temperature targets
The coal-fired power plant shown here emits not only carbon dioxide, but also nitrogen oxide and particulates. Including more types of emissions increases the amount of warming that humans have committed to by past emissions.
Countries around the world pledged in the Paris Agreement to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or, at most, 2 degrees Celsius. As emissions rates gradually begin to decline, countries are looking at how many greenhouse gases can still be emitted while remaining below these temperature targets, which are deemed the upper limits to avoid the most catastrophic impacts to the climate system.
New research led by the University of Washington calculates how much warming is already guaranteed by past emissions. While previous research has explored this question for carbon dioxide, the new work includes related emissions such as methane, nitrogen oxide and aerosols, like sulfur or soot.
Under a moderate future emissions scenario, by 2029 the planet has a two-thirds chance of at least temporarily exceeding warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius, even if all emissions cease on that date, the study finds. If humans continue on a moderate emissions pathway, by 2057 there’s a two-thirds chance that the planet will at least temporarily exceed warming of 2 degrees Celsius. The study was published June 6 in Nature Climate Change.
“It’s important for us to look at how much future global warming can be avoided by our actions and policies, and how much warming is inevitable because of past emissions,” said lead author Michelle Dvorak, a UW doctoral student in oceanography. “I think that hasn’t been clearly disentangled before — how much future warming will occur just based on what we’ve already emitted.”
“This paper looks at the temporary warming that can’t be avoided, and that’s important if you think about components of the climate system that respond quickly to global temperature changes, including Arctic sea ice, extreme events such as heat waves or floods, and many ecosystems,” said co-author Kyle Armour, a UW associate professor of atmospheric sciences and of oceanography. “Our study found that in all cases, we are committed by past emissions to reaching peak temperatures about five to 10 years before we experience them.”
UW, Seattle Public Library, Seattle Public Utilities collaboration uses VR goggles to visualize sea level rise in Seattle
University of Washington/The Seattle Public Library
The VR experience begins by explaining how gases like carbon dioxide create an invisible blanket around Earth, trapping solar radiation. The user can hold up a magnifying glass that makes Earth’s atmosphere appear blue. Later in the experience the narrator explains how glaciers in Antarctica, right, contribute to rising seas.
A new project uses virtual reality to help communicate what climate models are predicting: Greenhouse gas emissions are increasing Earth’s temperature, melting glaciers that could create many feet of global sea level rise by the end of this century.
The Our Future Duwamish project, available to community groups through The Seattle Public Library, uses Oculus Quest 2 goggles to help viewers imagine rising seas from a vantage point along the South Seattle waterway.
“Creative, interactive communication tools like virtual reality experiences offer a powerful way to spark conversations and action around climate change by helping show how a global-scale issue shows up in a very real way in our own communities,” said project leader Heidi Roop, who began the effort at the UW Climate Impacts Group and is now at the University of Minnesota.
The headsets and accompanying booklet are available as of this spring for checkout by community groups, such as Boys and Girls Clubs, youth groups or 4-H Clubs, which agree to take responsibility for the equipment. The Seattle Public Library is looking at more ways to make the experiences available to the public.
The VR experience builds on a Seattle Public Library project that used historical photos, maps and artifacts to show the history of the Duwamish River — from times when the Duwamish Tribe used the waterway for transportation, through the industrial pollution of the 1900s, to today’s ongoing cleanup effort. It extends the timeline to a future in which the riverfront is clean but rising sea levels lead to more flooding of coastal and lowland areas.
During the pandemic lockdown, many people were dabbling in urban farming or growing houseplants. University of Washington geomorphologist 
