Environment
press releases.

Environment7 Nov 2023

Window to the past: New microfossils suggest earlier rise in complex life

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Microfossils from Western Australia may capture a jump in the complexity of life that coincided with the rise of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere and oceans, according to an international team of scientists. The findings, published in the journal Geobiology, provide a rare window into the Great Oxidation Event, a time roughly 2.4 billion years ago when the oxygen concentration increased on Earth, fundamentally changing the planet’s surface. The event is thought to have triggered a mass extinction and opened the door for the development ...

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Environment7 Nov 2023

Greenland's ice shelves have lost more than a third of their volume

The largest floating ice shelves in the polar ice sheet have lost more than a third of their volume since 1978. In a study to be published on 7 November in Nature Communications, scientists from the CNRS1, alongside their Danish and American colleagues, have established that most of this thinning is due to the rise in surrounding ocean temperatures, which causes the glaciers’ floating extensions to melt. Until now, the glaciers in this region were considered to be stable, unlike more sensitive areas of the polar ice cap, which began to weaken in the mid-1980s. Located ...

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Environment6 Nov 2023

A cutting-edge approach to tackling pollution in Houston and beyond

With its notoriously hot and humid climate and robust industrial environment, Houston is one of the most ozone-polluted cities in the United States. Now, a University of Houston research team is integrating the power of machine learning (ML) with innovative analysis techniques to pinpoint the city’s air pollution sources more accurately. While the ozone layer in the stratosphere protects the Earth, and us, from the harmful rays of the sun, it’s also a major pollutant that can be harmful to human health when it’s closer to the ground. Long-term exposure to surface ozone can cause difficulty breathing, worsen asthma and increase the ...

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Environment6 Nov 2023

The last turn of ‘Ezekiel’s Wheel’ honors a Yale-affiliated fossil hunter

New Haven, Conn. — The mystery of Ezekiel’s Wheel — the extinct sea creature, not the Biblical vision — may have taken its final turn, thanks to Yale paleontologists. In so doing, the researchers have also finally put a scientific name to the favorite fossil of a beloved amateur fossil hunter. Samuel J. Ciurca Jr., who died in 2021, was a curatorial affiliate of the Yale Peabody Museum for many years. He collected tens of thousands of fossils, primarily from the Silurian rocks of upstate New York and southern Ontario, Canada. He donated more than 11,000 ...

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Environment6 Nov 2023

New model adds human reactions to flood risk assessment

Researchers at North Carolina State University have created a land change model that simulates interactions between urban growth, increased flooding and how humans adapt in response. The new model could offer a more realistic assessment of risk for urban planners, natural resource managers and other local government stakeholders. “Traditional risk assessment typically involves overlaying inundation layers – areas that may flood – onto existing development or population distribution to identify areas and communities at risk,” says Georgina Sanchez, ...

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Environment6 Nov 2023

Yang receives funding for climate risk profile studies for Africa

Ruixin Yang, Associate Professor, Geography and Geoinformation Science/Assistant Director, Center for Earth Observing Spatial Research (CEOSR), received $8,000 from the International Food Policy Research Institute for the project: "Climate Risk Profile Studies For Africa." Yang is producing hazard maps by major crops and by seasons. He is conducting an extensive review of existing hazard development methods employed by the Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS). Yang is also developing a Python program that focuses on mapping and identifying ...

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Environment6 Nov 2023

UC Irvine-led science team shows how to eat our way out of the climate crisis

Irvine, Calif., Nov. 6, 2023 — Agriculture is one of the hardest human activities to decarbonize; people must eat, but the land-use practices associated with growing crops account for roughly a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions. Researchers at the University of California, Irvine and other institutions evaluate a new solution to this problem, one that eliminates farms altogether. In a study published today in Nature Sustainability, the UCI-led team of scientists assess the potential for widescale synthetic production of dietary fats through chemical and biological processes. The raw materials for this method are the same as those used by ...

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Environment6 Nov 2023

Keeping an eye on the regions when it comes to climate change

Keeping an eye on the regions when it comes to climate change Up to now, the results of climate simulations have sometimes contradicted the analysis of climate traces from the past. A team led by the physicist Thomas Laepple from the Alfred Wegener Institute in Potsdam and the climatologist Kira Rehfeld from the University of Tübingen has therefore brought together experts in climate models and climate tracks to clarify how the discrepancies come about. The surprising result has now been published in the journal Nature Geoscience: in a way, both sides ...

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Environment6 Nov 2023

Food waste prevention in Europe can generate major footprint savings

New research shows that European food consumption draws unnecessarily excessively on global resources, which is why researchers are calling for political action. Many of the foods that are consumed in Europe are produced in countries outside Europe. Food loss – and waste later in the chain, (read more on waste terms below) – occurs along the food supply chain, from the primary agricultural sector in Europe or rest of the world, until it feeds mouths in Europe. “Halving Europe’s food loss and waste, together with a redistribution of global food resources, could solve the challenges of food shortages in the ...

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Environment6 Nov 2023

Fossils tell tale of last primate to inhabit North America before humans

LAWRENCE — The story of Ekgmowechashala, the final primate to inhabit North America before Homo sapiens or Clovis people, reads like a spaghetti western: A grizzled and mysterious loner, against the odds, ekes out an existence on the American Plains. Except this tale unfolded about 30 million years ago, just after the Eocene-Oligocene transition during which North America saw great cooling and drying, making the continent less hospitable to warmth-loving primates. Today, paleontologists from the University ...

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Environment3 Nov 2023

How salt from the Caribbean affects our climate

Joint press release by MARUM - Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen and GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel The distribution of salt by ocean currents plays a crucial role in regulating the global climate. This is what researchers from Dalhousie University in Canada, GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel, Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) and MARUM – Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen have found in a new study. ...

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Environment3 Nov 2023

The kids aren't alright: Saplings reveal how changing climate may undermine forests

As climate scientist Don Falk was hiking through a forest, the old, green pines stretched overhead. But he had the feeling that something was missing. Then his eyes found it: a seedling, brittle and brown, overlooked because of its lifelessness. Once Falk's eyes found one, the others quickly fell into his awareness. An entire generation of young trees had died. Falk – a professor in the UArizona School of Natural Resources and the Environment, with joint appointments in the Laboratory ...

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Environment3 Nov 2023

Mother Nature knows best when it comes to climate solutions, social media users say

People feel more positive about planting trees and protecting rainforests as a means of combating climate change than they do about employing technological solutions, according to a new research paper in Global Environmental Change. A survey of more than a million social media posts suggests that people feel more positive about Nature's ability to solve climate change than human technology, according to new research published in the journal Global Environmental Change. Researchers analysing 1.5 million posts on X (formerly Twitter) using the latest artificial intelligence-driven language models found expressions of “disgust” ...

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Environment3 Nov 2023

America’s low-carbon transition could improve employment opportunities for all

The USA is likely to see consistent job growth from the transition to net zero, but the gains will be unevenly distributed, shows a new analysis. The analysis, conducted by Imperial College London researchers and published today in Nature Climate Change, shows that some states will need new policies to ensure a ‘just’ transition. The USA, alongside many countries, is planning for a low-carbon future, where energy production releases little to no carbon dioxide and what is released is removed from the atmosphere, creating net-zero carbon emissions. This has been backed by new policies, including the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which includes large investment ...

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Environment2 Nov 2023

Researchers caution that biodiversity benefit-sharing needs a radically new approach

At the 2022 COP-15 meeting, signatories of the Convention on Biological Diversity reached a new agreement called the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which contained provisions to establish a separate, multilateral benefit-sharing mechanism for the use of “digital sequence information” (DSI), that is, the biological data associated with, or derived from, genetic resources such as nucleotide sequences and epigenetic, protein, and metabolite data. In a new Policy Forum analysis published ...

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Environment2 Nov 2023

How “blue” and “green” appeared in a language that didn’t have words for them

CAMBRIDGE, MA -- The human eye can perceive about 1 million colors, but languages have far fewer words to describe those colors. So-called basic color terms, single color words used frequently by speakers of a given language, are often employed to gauge how languages differ in their handling of color. Languages spoken in industrialized nations such as the United States, for example, tend to have about a dozen basic color terms, while languages spoken by more isolated populations often have fewer. However, the way that a language ...

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Environment2 Nov 2023

Plant populations in Cologne are adapted to their urban environments

A research team from the Universities of Cologne and Potsdam and the Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research has found that the regional lines of the thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana), a small ruderal plant which populates the streets of Cologne, vary greatly in typical life cycle characteristics, such as the regulation of flowering and germination. This allows them to adapt their reproduction to local environmental conditions such as temperature and human disturbances. The researchers from Collaborative Research Center / Transregio 341 “Plant Ecological Genetics” found that environmental ...

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Environment2 Nov 2023

Climate-induced loss is impeding human rights in the Pacific

Climate change is impeding the human rights of a large group of people living in the Pacific, a recent report in Nature reveals. The paper substantiates a submission to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the legal responsibility of countries to act on climate change. Evidence gathered in Vanuatu supports a clarification on loss and damage finance which could activate powerful legal tools to hold polluters accountable. Research Fellow at the Griffith University Climate Action Beacon, Dr Ross Westoby said the report explores how climate-induced loss and damage in the Pacific is already occurring and outlines ...

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Environment2 Nov 2023

Scientists discussed the key questions of solar wind–moon interaction

As the nearest celestial body to Earth, Moon’s space environment is distinctive to Earth’s mainly because of lack of a significant atmosphere/ionosphere and a global magnetic field. From a global perspective, solar wind can bombard its surface, and the solar wind materials cumulated in the soil record the evolution of the Solar System. Many small-scale remanent magnetic fields are scattered over the lunar surface and, just as planetary magnetic fields protect planets, they are believed to divert the incident solar wind and shield the local lunar surface beneath, thus producing ...

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Environment2 Nov 2023

Drexel University study projects more water shortfalls in Schuylkill Watershed in next 20 years due to climate change

Research out of Drexel University’s College of Engineering suggests that over the next two decades people living in the Schuylkill Watershed, which includes Philadelphia, could experience as many as 82 more days of water shortfalls due to localized weather impacts of climate change. The projections, which account for changes in population, land use, and climate, indicate that — due to more frequent extreme weather events associated with climate change — the watershed may only be able to meet demand about 67% of the time, a drop of 22% from its current reliability. Published in the journal Water, the paper ...

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Environment2 Nov 2023

The influence of media narratives on microplastics risk perception revealed

In a world increasingly aware of the environmental challenges posed by microplastics, a pioneering study conducted by Ruxandra Malina Petrescu-Mag from Babes-Bolyai University, and published in PeerJ Life & Environment, sheds new light on the impact of media narratives on public perception and awareness of microplastic risks. Microplastics - tiny plastic particles that pollute both terrestrial and marine ecosystems - have garnered significant scientific, media, and public attention in recent years. However, this study reveals a lack of consensus between the scientific community and the media, particularly when it comes to how ...

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Environment2 Nov 2023

Paper argues reducing greenhouse gas emissions is not enough to combat climate change

According to a new paper in Oxford Open Climate Change, published by Oxford University Press, the strategies humanity must pursue to reduce climate change will have to include more than reducing greenhouse gases. This comes from an analysis of climate data led by researcher James Hansen. Scientists have known since the 1800s that infrared-absorbing (greenhouse) gases warm the Earth’s surface and that the abundance of greenhouse gases changes naturally as well as from human actions. Roger Revelle, who was one of the early scientists to study global warming, wrote in 1965 that industrialization meant that human ...

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Environment2 Nov 2023

Stronger, stretchier, self-healing plastic

An innovative plastic, stronger and stretchier than the current standard type and which can be healed with heat, remembers its shape and partially biodegradable, has been developed by researchers at the University of Tokyo. They created it by adding the molecule polyrotaxane to an epoxy resin vitrimer, a type of plastic. Named VPR, the material can hold its form and has strong internal chemical bonds at low temperatures. However, at temperatures above 150 degrees Celsius, those bonds recombine and the material can be reformed into different shapes. Applying heat and a solvent breaks VPR down into its raw components. Submerging it in seawater ...

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Environment1 Nov 2023

The ringed seals in Ilulissat Icefjord, Greenland are special

Exploring Arctic nature can be difficult. Harsh conditions and great distances are significant challenges when researchers want to coax secrets out of nature. However, a research project, led by Greenlandic and Danish researchers, has now succeeded in describing a new type of ringed seal that lives in the Icefjord near Ilulissat in West Greenland; a unique natural area on the UNESCO World Heritage List. The results have just been published in the renowned scientific journal Molecular Ecology. A small population Over ...

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Environment1 Nov 2023

How the relationship between the land and atmosphere facilitated the persistence of eastern China’s extreme weather and climate in summer 2022？

Extreme weather and climate events, such as droughts, heatwaves, and rainstorms, pose serious threats to human health, agricultural production, and energy supplies. These events often occur at the same time, and such "compound extreme events" can cause far more damage than any one single event. Climate scientists from the research group of Prof. Aihui Wang from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China, argue in a new study that land–atmosphere coupling (the coupling ...

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