New research from the University of Washington uses bubbles trapped in 2.7 billion-year-old rocks to show that air at that time exerted at most half the pressure of today's atmosphere.
Read more at UW Today »
World leaders gathered in Paris in December to forge a global agreement to limit planet-warming carbon emissions. Similar summits had been held before, but the event was the first this century to end with an international agreement. The U.S., China and other countries will sign the document into law on Friday—appropriately enough, Earth Day. The Paris talks were attended by thousands of delegates, including four undergraduates from the University of Washington.
Read more at UW Today »
What would it be like to spend an entire year embedded in the forest, learning about the human and natural history of a 100-year-old tree? Local author and Seattle Times reporter Lynda V. Mapes did just that during her Bullard Fellowship in Forest Research, in which she spent 2014-15 at Harvard Forest in Petersham, Massachusetts, learning from scientists, researchers—and an old red oak tree.
Read more at UW Today »
It turns out not all clouds are created equal. Though Seattle presents an ideal location for cloud-gazing, it can’t reproduce the unique clouds in a part of the world thought to play a key role in the planet’s climate. The vast Southern Ocean circling Antarctica soaks up a large portion of the carbon emissions taken up by the oceans and stores some of the extra heat trapped by the carbon emissions that remain in the air.
Read more at UW Today »
Global carbon dioxide emissions are triggering troubling changes to ocean chemistry along the West Coast that require immediate, decisive actions to combat through a coordinated regional approach, a panel of scientific experts has unanimously concluded. A failure to adequately respond to this fundamental change in seawater chemistry, known as ocean acidification, is anticipated to have devastating ecological consequences for the West Coast in the decades to come, the 20-member West Coast Ocean Acidification and Hypoxia (OAH) Science Panel warned in a comprehensive report unveiled April 4.
Read more at UW Today »
