Think Seattle is dark in winter? Imagine going farther north. Cecilia Peralta Ferriz, an oceanographer at the UW’s Applied Physics Laboratory who completed her doctorate at UW’s School of Oceanography in 2012, knows what that’s like. Last fall she was awarded a U.S. Fulbright Scholarship to spend nine months in Norway, based at the Norwegian Polar Institute in Tromsø, the third largest urban area north of the Arctic Circle.
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The deepest-dwelling fish in the sea just got one more bragging right. The World Register of Marine Species, or WoRMS, has named the Mariana snailfish one of its 10 “remarkable new species” discovered in 2017. The team that discovered and named the small fish that lives at ocean depths of up to 8,000 meters (26,200 feet) includes Mackenzie Gerringer, a postdoctoral researcher at the UW’s Friday Harbor Laboratories.
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College of the Environment faculty received all three of the University of Washington’s Innovation Awards for 2018. The awards are designed to stimulate innovation among faculty from a range of disciplines and to reward some of their most novel ideas, and are made possible by generous donors. Knut Christianson and Michelle Koutnik from the Earth and Space Sciences, along with David Shean from Civil and Environmental Engineering, were awarded $300,000 over two years to “build a digital glacier time machine” that will generate a high-resolution, 3-D time series of how glaciers have changed over time to help understand the future of water resources in the western United States.
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The reduction of Arctic sea ice has a clear impact on animals that rely on frozen surfaces for feeding, mating and migrating. But sea ice loss is changing Arctic habitat and affecting other species in more indirect ways, new research finds. Beluga whales that spend summers feeding in the Arctic must dive deeper and longer to find food than in previous years, according to a new analysis led by University of Washington researchers.
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Narwhals are some of the most elusive creatures in the ocean, spending most of their lives in deep water far from shore. But research being presented at the Ocean Sciences Meeting in Portland Feb. 12 may shed a bit of light on these enigmatic marine mammals. New research shows narwhals may prefer to congregate near unique glacier fjords with thick ice fronts and low to moderate calving activity, where icebergs break off infrequently.
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