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    November 2021

    Feature Story

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    Nov 2, 2021
    • Ecology

    After California’s 3rd-largest wildfire, deer returned home while trees were ‘still smoldering’

    A deer peeks at the camera amidst burnt trees
    Samantha Kreling
    A black-tailed deer at the University of California’s Hopland Research and Extension Center, seen after the 2018 Mendocino Complex Fire. Deer from burned areas had to work harder and travel farther to find green vegetation, and researchers noticed a decline in body condition in some of the animals.

    When a massive wildfire tears through a landscape, what happens to the animals?

    While many animals have adapted to live with wildfires of the past — which were smaller, more frequent and kept ecosystems in balance across the West — it’s unclear to scientists how animals are coping with today’s unprecedented megafires. More than a century of fire suppression coupled with climate change has produced wildfires that are now bigger and more severe than before.

    In a rare stroke of luck, researchers from the University of Washington, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Santa Barbara, were able to track a group of black-tailed deer during and after California’s third-largest wildfire, the 2018 Mendocino Complex Fire. The megafire, which torched more than 450,000 acres in northern California, burned across half of an established study site, making it possible to record the movements and feeding patterns of deer before, during and after the fire. The results were published Oct. 28 in the journal Ecology and Evolution.

    The researchers were surprised by what they learned. Of the 18 deer studied, all survived. Deer that had to flee the flames returned home, despite some areas of the landscape being completely burned and void of vegetation to eat. Most of the deer returned home within hours of the fire, while trees were still smoldering.

    Having access to this location information — from previously placed wildlife cameras and GPS collars — is rare when studying how animals respond to extreme and unpredictable events, like megafires.

    “There are very few studies that aim to understand the short-term, immediate responses of animals to wildfires. When a fire sweeps through and dramatically changes the landscape, its impact in those initial days is undervalued and absent in the published literature,” said co-lead author Samantha Kreling, a doctoral student at the UW School of Environmental and Forest Sciences.

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    Nov 18, 2021
    • Climate

    Deforestation, climate change linked to more worker deaths and unsafe conditions

    Outdoor workers in the world’s lower-latitude tropical forests may face a greater risk of heat-related deaths and unsafe working conditions because of deforestation and climate warming, according to a study led by The Nature Conservancy, the University of Washington and Indonesia’s Mulawarman University.

    In the study, researchers found that increased temperatures of 0.95 C (1.7 F) in the deforested areas of Berau Regency, Indonesia, between 2002 and 2018 were linked to roughly 118 additional deaths in 2018, and 20 additional minutes of daily conditions too hot for humans to work in safely. Future climate warming of 2 C (3.6 F) above 2018’s levels could increase deaths in Berau by 20% (approximately 282 additional annual deaths) and another five unsafe work hours per day — even without greater deforestation.

    Researchers point out that the increase in heat-related deaths with a 2 C rise in global temperatures would be comparable to mortality from other long-term public health challenges in Asia, such as tobacco smoking. In addition, they write, “workers in Berau are already adapting to hotter temperatures due to deforestation, suggesting those engaged in outdoor work may already be approaching their adaptive capacity through behavioral adaptations.”

    The study published Thursday in Lancet Planetary Health used publicly available and secondary data such as satellite monitoring of forest cover, temperatures, climate models, population densities, and the Global Burden of Disease report published annually in The Lancet by the UW Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. Researchers focused on Berau as an area emblematic of tropical forest regions facing rapid deforestation.

    UW authors of the study are Lucas Vargas Zeppetello, graduate student, and David Battisti, professor and Tamaki Endowed Chair, in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences; and Kristie Ebi, professor of global health and environmental and occupational health sciences in the School of Public Health. For complete list of authors and more about the study see The Nature Conservancy’s media release.

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    Nov 10, 2021
    • Climate

    New method shows today’s warming ‘unprecedented’ over past 24,000 years

    A graph showing globally averaged surface air temperature since the last ice age
    Osman et al./Nature
    The blue line shows globally averaged surface air temperature since the last ice age, 24,000 years ago, created by assimilating paleoclimate records with a computer model of the climate system. Time is stretched for the past 1,000 years to visualize recent changes. Warming begins at the end of the last ice age, roughly 18,000 years ago, then temperatures stabilize. While previous studies showed a slight cooling over the past 10,000 years, the new analysis shows a slight warming trend. The curve steepens in recent decades with the accumulation of atmospheric greenhouse gases.

    A new effort to reconstruct Earth’s climate since the last ice age, about 24,000 years ago, highlights the main drivers of climate change, and how far out of bounds human activity has pushed the climate system.

    The University of Arizona-led study uses a technique for reconstructing past temperatures developed by co-authors at the University of Washington. The study, published Nov. 10 in Nature, has three main findings:

    • It verifies that the main drivers of climate change since the last ice age are rising greenhouse gas concentrations and the retreat of the ice sheets
    • It suggests a general warming trend over the last 10,000 years — settling a decade-long debate in the paleoclimatology community about whether this period trended warmer or cooler
    • The magnitude and rate of warming over the last 150 years far surpasses the magnitude and rate of changes at any other time over the last 24,000 years

    “Paleoclimate records provide the only record we have of these past climates, but these records are imperfect and they have gaps in space and time. Climate models provide simulations based on the laws of physics, but lack the observational record,” said co-author Gregory Hakim, a UW professor of atmospheric sciences. “Combining models and paleoclimate proxies — using the technique we developed for the Last Millennium Reanalysis — provides the best spatially complete estimate of the actual past climate, constrained by physics.”

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    Nov 2, 2021
    • Climate
    • Polar Science
    • Awards and Honors

    UW oceanographer will study how glacial particles remove CO2 from atmosphere

    A glacier in Prince William Sound, Alaska
    Rob Campbell/Prince William Sound Science Center
    Prince William Sound, on the southern coast of Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, is home to glaciers that make contact with the ocean. The unique marine chemistry in these environments could help scientists understand how glacial particles react with seawater and atmospheric carbon dioxide.

    An oceanographer at the University of Washington is part of a new project to study how glacial particles, created as glaciers grind the rock beneath them into a powder, react with seawater to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

    Alex Gagnon, an associate professor of oceanography at the UW, is one of the investigators on a newly funded project that involves field and lab studies of a natural setting that could help us understand the ocean’s role in carbon removal, which many experts believe will need to be combined with emissions reductions to address climate change.

    ClimateWorks Foundation, a nonprofit based in San Francisco, and Ocean Visions, a research consortium, announced on Oct. 28 two 18-month grants to evaluate the environmental impacts of ocean-based carbon dioxide removal approaches through the study of natural environments.

    Ocean-based carbon dioxide removal analogs are defined as natural marine settings that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere via processes that could theoretically be replicated, sped up or done at larger scales.

    The team’s $220,000 grant will fund a study near the edge of glaciers that contact the ocean at high tides in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. Researchers will measure the rate of addition of alkaline material from rocks surrounding the fjords, where glaciers naturally pulverize rocks and discharge fine-grained particles into the ocean. The study will measure CO2 uptake at various water depths and in the sediments to test the link between adding alkaline powder and atmospheric CO2 removal. The team will also determine how trace metals released by the rocks, such as zinc and iron, affect marine ecosystems.

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    Nov 2, 2021
    • Marine Science
    • Resource Management

    How Dungeness crabs’ complex lifecycle will be affected by climate change

    A Dungeness crab, or Cancer magister, sits on kelp
    Jerry Kirkhart/Flickr
    A Dungeness crab, or Cancer magister, sits on kelp.

    New research on the Pacific Northwest portion of the Dungeness crab fishery, which spans the West Coast of the U.S. and Canada, projects how this crustacean will fare under climate change.

    Results show that by the end of this century, lower-oxygen water will pose the biggest threat. And while these crabs start as tiny, free-floating larvae, it’s the sharp-clawed adults that will be most vulnerable, specifically to lower-oxygen coastal waters in summer.

    The open-access study from researchers at the University of Washington, the University of Connecticut and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will be in the December issue of AGU Advances, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

    Dungeness crab is the largest single-species fishery in the Northwestern U.S. Washington’s Dungeness Crab Festival takes place in October near the Dungeness Cove that gives the species its name, and the crustacean is a favorite of Pacific Northwest holiday meals and in traditional diets. The study was designed in consultation with the Hoh, Makah, Quileute and Quinault Indian Nation tribes, whose members harvest, study and eat Dungeness crab on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula.

    The researchers used a detailed computer model of ocean conditions to simulate the shifting properties of the water the crabs inhabit. Using a scenario of high carbon emissions through 2100, the model looks at how heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere will make the ocean warmer, carbon dioxide transferred from the air will make the surface waters more acidic, and warmer water will hold less dissolved oxygen.

    “The value of this down-scaled model is that it can help tribes and state agencies to focus their efforts in both space and time,” said co-author Jan Newton, an oceanographer at UW and co-director of the Washington Ocean Acidification Center. “This information is very pertinent to resource managers.”

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    Nov 2, 2021
    • Geophysical Sciences
    • Awards and Honors

    UW petrologist George Bergantz honored with AGU Bowen Award and Lecture

    Earth and Space Sciences' George Bergantz
    George Bergantz

    University of Washington Department of Earth and Space Sciences petrologist George Bergantz is one of two 2021 recipients of the Norman L. Bowen Award and Lecture from the American Geophysical Union, a named lectureship which the organization presents annually to one or more mid-career or senior scientists in recognition of outstanding contributions to the fields of volcanology, geochemistry and petrology.

    The award reflects Bergantz’s innovative scientific contributions on the physics of magmas, hydrothermal systems, metamorphism, and eruption processes. As a member of the physical petrology group at UW, Bergantz studies the transport of magma in the Earth’s deep crust and mantle, as well as the life cycles of volcanic systems.

    Bergantz earned his bachelor’s in geological engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno, his master’s in geophysical sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and his doctorate in Earth and planetary sciences at Johns Hopkins University before joining the UW faculty in 1988. He has done extensive field studies in Italy, Greece, Chile and Argentina, among other places, and is an elected Fellow of the Geological Society of America.

    Bergantz will present the Bowen Lecture in December at the American Geophysical Union’s annual meeting, to be held this year as a hybrid event based in New Orleans.

    Also of note is UW Earth and Space Sciences alumna Brooke Medley, now of the NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center, who will receive the AGU’s Cryosphere Early Career Award.

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    Events

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    December 1, 2021

    Banse Early Career Scientist Seminar Series: Ken Hughes

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    December 18, 2021

    Forest Bathing Walk (in-person)

    Calendar Icon Check out our calendar for more events

    News From Around the College

    • Infrastructure matters for wildlife too – here's how aging culverts are blocking Pacific salmon migration, The Conversation / Environmental and Forest Sciences
    • Here's why landslides may not happen until after big rain events, KING 5 / Earth and Space Sciences
    • Could we ever stop a hurricane in its tracks?, Gizmodo / Atmospheric Sciences
    • How 4 environmentalists travel with the climate in mind, Washington Post / Marine and Environmental Affairs
    • Who are you calling 'birdbrain'?, Wired / Environmental and Forest Sciences
    • Perspective | An imperative to act: Carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere takes ages to draw down, Washington Post / Atmospheric Sciences

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