Northern peatlands store approximately one-third of Earth’s terrestrial soil organic carbon due to their cold, water-saturated, and acidic conditions, which slow decomposition. To learn more, researchers — including School of Biological Sciences and School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Professor Joel Kostka — leveraged the SPRUCE experiment, where scientists can combine air and peat warming in a whole-ecosystem warming treatment. Peatlands build carbon stocks over centuries, but rising temperatures and atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations rapidly changed the equilibrium at SPRUCE within a 4-year timescale, highlighting the vulnerability of these carbon-rich ecosystems to global climate change.
U.S. Department of Energy
March 6, 2024This past summer, waters around the world experienced what has been referred to as marine heatwaves. In this episode of the podcast Grass Roots Health, host Tim Jordan explores the issue of our water and land growing warmer with special guest, Annalisa Bracco, associate chair and professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.
1795 Group, Grass Roots Health
March 5, 2024Ocean waters are constantly on the move, traveling far distances in complex currents that regulate Earth's climate and weather patterns. How might climate change impact this critical system? Oceanographer, College of Sciences Dean, and Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Chair Susan Lozier dives into the data in her TED Talk. Her work suggests that ocean overturning is slowing down as waters gradually warm — and her talk takes us on board the international effort to track these changes and set us on the right course while we still have time.
TED
February 22, 2024In a warming climate, meltwater from Antarctica is expected to contribute significantly to rising seas. For the most part, though, research has been focused on West Antarctica, in places like the Thwaites Glacier, which has seen significant melt in recent decades. In a paper published Jan. 19 in Geophysical Research Letters, researchers at Stanford have shown that the Wilkes Subglacial Basin in East Antarctica, which holds enough ice to raise global sea levels by more than 10 feet, could be closer to runaway melting than anyone realized. One of the study's co-authors is Winnie Chu, assistant professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.
Mirage News
February 5, 2024Atlanta’s Snowmageddon, or Snowpocalypse, was 10 years ago this weekend. The winter storm brought the metro area to a complete halt. It also changed the way many in Georgia looked at winter weather. About two-and-a-half inches of snow fell on January 28, 2014, but it was enough to turn interstates across the metro into parking lots. Everyone tried to get home all at once as the snow fell. Slush froze on the roadways, trapping drivers. Children were forced to sleep at schools and some drivers chose to abandon their cars and walk instead. "The air was so cold. I think forecast models struggled to completely estimate correctly the type of wintery precipitation that was about to happen," Zachary Handlos, senior academic professional in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, explained. (This story was reprinted at AOL.com)
Fox 5 Atlanta
January 26, 2024Chemical disequilibrium quantified using the available free energy has previously been proposed as a potential biosignature. However, researchers remotely sensing exoplanet biosignatures have not yet investigated how observational uncertainties impact the ability to infer a life-generated available free energy. This study's researchers pair an atmospheric retrieval tool to a thermodynamics model to assess the detectability of chemical disequilibrium signatures of Earth-like exoplanets, focusing on the Proterozoic eon when the atmospheric abundances of oxygen–methane disequilibrium pairs may have been relatively high. One of the study's authors is Chris Reinhard, associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.
Nature Astronomy
January 22, 2024Expedition cruises are the choice of adventurous, nature-loving and sustainability minded passengers who want to visit remote places, while also having a luxury experience. The locations of these expeditions are often threatened by climate change, giving travellers a chance to see endangered landscapes or species, possibly before they disappear. But burning fossil fuels to visit threatened environments definitely feels ironic. The desire to witness these endangered landscapes like Greenland, which is experiencing record melting, is sometimes labelled “last-chance tourism.” Meghana Ranganathan, a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, is quoted in this article
Canadian Geographic
January 17, 2024While 2023 has already been called the world's hottest year, the full set of climate data up to December 31 shows global temperatures reached "exceptionally" high levels last year, according to the European Union's key climate service. It found Earth was 1.48 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial levels, with temperatures during the year overtaking the previous record set in 2016 by a large margin. This story offers a glimpse of some of the defining events from the world's hottest year in pictures and charts. Annalisa Bracco, professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, said it was "very plausible" that intensely warm ocean temperatures aided several of these events, including extreme rainfall and severe coral bleaching, although formal studies would be required to confirm it.
Australian Broadcasting Company
January 9, 2024Alien hunters should search for technological life on planets that possess a high oxygen abundance in their atmospheres, according to new research that aims to hone the search for technosignatures from extraterrestrial civilizations. The study from scientists at the University of Roma Tor Vergata in Italy and the University of Rochester in the U.S. argues that a planet's atmosphere needs to contain at least 18 percent oxygen to facilitate a technological civilization. The reason for this, they say, is a simple one: oxygen is needed for fire. This story cites another study detailing a future oxygen-related challenge for the Earth — as the sun ages and brightens in a billion years to produce more heat that warms our planet in turn, Earth's atmosphere will become deoxygenated, with oxygen levels dropping below 10 percent. That study's co-author is Christopher Reinhard, associate professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.
Space.com
January 4, 2024Africa is on fire. It has been for thousands of years. The continent contains more than 50 percent of the total area on Earth that is burning, on average, and there is no sign of it stopping; indeed, the migrating hemisphere-hopping African wildfire season is steadily increasing. The fire is essentially feeding itself in a vicious cycle involving aerosols, tiny particles that have a large impact on Earth's climate. Their interaction with the climate is intricate; they reinforce regulations of African ecosystems and pave the way for evolving wildfire patterns each year. The findings appear in a new study co-authored by Yuhang Wang, professor in the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences.
Nature World News
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