University of Washington scientists in the Department of Earth and Space Sciences were part of a multi-institutional research team that has discovered a consistent link between abrupt temperature changes in Greenland and Antarctica during the most recent ice age. Using evidence trapped in ice cores from the West Antarctica Ice Sheet, the team from UW used analyses of oxygen molecules in the ice to uncover precise records of Antarctica’s temperature history.
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David Battisti isn’t trying to save the world. He’s trying to understand it, he says. A professor of atmospheric sciences at the College of the Environment, he works to increase our collective knowledge on the global climate system and its natural variation. He’s interested in how the oceans, sea ice, atmosphere, and land interact and lead to variability in the climate—what we experience as weather.
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Scientists from the College of the Environment are partnering with NASA and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency to find out if a constellation of precipitation-measuring satellites collects accurate data. The initiative, called OLYMPEX, aims to calibrate and validate rain and snowfall data collected by the Global Precipitation Measurement (GSM). Focusing their efforts on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, the soggiest place in the continental United States and a perfect laboratory for precipitation-related research, the scientists will amass data through a variety of ground- and air-based approaches.
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Aquatic and Fishery Sciences’ Kristin Laidre and a team from across the globe just published their findings on what the future looks like for Arctic marine mammals, whose fragile habitats are shifting as a result of sea ice loss and warming temperatures. Their recent study, published in Conservation Biology, found that reductions in sea ice cover are “profound” and that the Arctic’s traditionally short, cool summers are growing longer in most regions by five to 10 weeks.
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Across western North America you can see them: hills blanketed with swaths of red and gray trees. These dead and dying stands of pine, aspen, and fir, totaling around 42 million acres—roughly the size of the state of Washington—are victims of bark beetles. And the dry, decaying trees that the beetles leave in their wake are not just eyesores; they also fuel hotter and larger wildfires.
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