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Diversity is strength, even among forests. In a paper published in Nature, researchers led by University of Utah biologist William Anderegg report that forests with trees that employ a high diversity of traits related to water use suffer less of an impact from drought. The results, which expand on previous work that looked at individual tree species’ resilience based on hydraulic traits, lead to new research directions on forest resilience and inform forest managers working to rebuild forests after logging or wildfire.

New research on Antarctic sediment layers has shown that the East Antarctic Ice Sheet (EAIS), also known as Antarctica’s ‘sleeping giant’, retreated during extended warm periods in the past - when temperatures were like those predicted for this century.

Years ago, Tzu-Chieh “Zijay” Tang and his peers in his high school biology club would gather after school to go on a nature hike into the mountains of Taipei, Taiwan. Together, they’d trek eight or nine miles, often reaching the summit of choice past midnight. For Tang, that’s when the mountains truly became alive.

In the last few years, the Vavilov Ice Cap in the Russian High Arctic has dramatically accelerated, sliding as much as 82 feet a day in 2015, according to a new multi-national, multi-institute study led by CIRES Fellow Mike Willis, an assistant professor of Geology at CU Boulder. That dwarfs the ice's previous average speed of about 2 inches per day and has challenged scientists' assumptions about the stability of the cold ice caps dotting Earth's high latitudes.

Most of today's batteries are made up of rare lithium mined from the mountains of South America. If the world depletes this source, then battery production could stagnate.