articles

It’s a scene that will be familiar for many after yet another scorching summer: You’re lying awake during a warm night, bedsheets kicked aside, an overmatched ceiling fan providing little respite as you struggle to get a good night’s sleep.

A study led by the University of Reading found that the amount of winter rain and snow in the western Himalayas could vary by almost 50% depending on the air pressure gradient over the Atlantic Ocean between the Azores and Iceland.

Almost half of Kenai Fjords National Park, which sits on the southern coast of Alaska, is covered in glacial ice.

Over the last decade, researchers have learned a lot about the polar night — discovering everything from how tiny marine critters migrate up and down in the sea in response to the weak light of the moon, to seabirds that dive into the pitch-black ocean to feast on bioluminescent plankton and krill.

A new study by Webster University Biology Associate Professor Nicole Miller-Struttmann, University of Missouri at Columbia Professor Emerita Candace Galen and University of Missouri Ph.D. student Zack Miller has identified a critical piece of the puzzle for a question that has troubled scientists tracking biodiversity as the climate warms– why are once abundant species declining?