Mar 8, 2024

Enrollment at UW College of the Environment continues to climb

The UW College of the Environment has experienced tremendous growth in undergraduate student majors since its inception 15 years ago, with most of that growth coming in recent years. In the 2011-12 academic year, the College enrolled nearly 1,050 undergraduate students across seven different majors offered throughout the College. Fast forward to the current academic year, and there are nearly 1,900 students enrolled in eight majors (Marine Biology was added as a major in 2018-19).

Video: UW cherry blossoms in peak bloom

The cherry trees on the UW Quad have reached their prime. A group of students in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences has been monitoring the timing of blossoms across campus since 2018, with the goal of creating a model that will use weather data to predict the timing of peak bloom in future years.

Scientists CT-scanned thousands of natural history specimens, which you can access for free

Natural history museums have entered a new stage of discovery and accessibility — one where scientists around the globe and curious folks at home can access valuable museum specimens to study, learn or just be amazed. This new era follows the completion of openVertebrate, or oVert, a five-year collaborative project among 18 institutions, including the UW, to create 3D reconstructions of vertebrate specimens and make them freely available online.

Cryptic carbon: UW study finds hidden wetlands in the forest

When it comes to climate change, an important question is not simply how can humans stop emitting greenhouse gases, but how can we remove the greenhouse gases that we’ve already released? Many of Earth’s natural processes are already taking significant amounts of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, and our wetland ecosystems are some of the most effective at this work.

80 mph speed record for glacier fracture helps reveal the physics of ice sheet collapse

Illustration of an iceberg with a rift extending from the above water surface to well below under the water

There’s enough water frozen in Greenland and Antarctic glaciers that if they melted, global seas would rise by many feet. What will happen to these glaciers over the coming decades is the biggest unknown in the future of rising seas, partly because glacier fracture physics is not yet fully understood. A critical question is how warmer oceans might cause glaciers to break apart more quickly.