Salmon are beginning to swim up the Elwha River for the first time in more than a century. But University of Washington marine geologists are watching what’s beginning to flow downstream — sediments from the largest dam-removal project ever undertaken.  Read more about this and see photos published in UW Today. 

Archeologists have long assumed the evolutionary development of strong, thick-enameled teeth coincides with a mammals shift to a diet of field grasses. However, a new study in Nature Communications shows some Argentine mammals developed sturdy chompers in response to gritty volcanic dust that appeared in their tropical rainforest habitat. “The assumption about grasslands and the evolution of these teeth was based on animal fossils,” said co-author Caroline Strömberg, from Earth and Space Sciences. 

Snow is hard. This is a fact of meteorological life. A forecaster trying to predict snowfall has to track many variables: the amount of precipitation, the intensity of precipitation, the air temperature, the surface temperature, the atmospheric structure, the timing of everything, the migration of the rain/snow line, and so on. ATMO’s Cliff Mass is mentioned in this discussion of the challenges of snow-casting; Read the full article from the Washington Post. 

The National Center for Science Education is offering a free preview (PDF) of ESS’ Peter D. Ward’s The Flooded Earth: Our Future in a World Without Ice Caps