A new grant will let a University of Washington-based project add a new fleet to its quest to learn more about past climate from the records of long-gone mariners. The UW is among the winners of the 2017 “Digitizing Hidden Special Collections and Archives” awards, announced earlier this month by the Washington, D.C.-based Council on Library and Information Resources.            

Kenneth Feeley, the Smathers Chair of Tropical Tree Biology in the University of Miami’s Department of Biology, is an expert in studying the effects of climate change on tropical forests. From the mountains of Peru to the lowlands of the Amazon, Feeley examines the ramifications of climate change on the trees and other species that comprise the diverse forests of these regions. Yet, recently, Feeley shifted gears from studying tropical forests to examining the impacts of climate change in rural farming communities in Peru.

NASA found heavy rainfall in Tropical Cyclone Berguitta as it closed in on Mauritius and Reunion Islands. On Jan. 18, NASA's Terra satellite captured an early morning visible image that showed the center of the storm just south of Mauritius and the storm blanketing both islands. Warnings were in effect for both islands. A tropical cyclone alert class 3 is in effect for Mauritius and La Reunion is on Orange Alert. 

Big data and data mining have provided several breakthroughs in fields such as health informatics, smart cities and marketing. The same techniques, however, have not delivered consistent key findings for climate change.

Wildlife ecologists studying the rare Spotted owl in the forests of California have discovered that large, intense wildfires are not responsible for the breeding territory extinction that has been reported recently.

Wildfires, extreme storms and major weather events can seem like a distant threat, but for those whose lives have been directly impacted by these events, the threat hits much closer to home.

Financial aid to fisheries in developing countries has declined by 30 percent, finds a new study from UBC and Stockholm Resilience Centre researchers, published in Marine Policy. Projects focusing on climate issues in fisheries had a 77 percent decline over the five years studied.

Ocean sediments are a massive storehouse for the potent greenhouse gas methane.

Heavy rain surrounded Tropical Cyclone Berguitta as it continued to move toward the island of Mauritius in the Southern Indian Ocean. NASA calculated the rate in which rain was falling within the hurricane-strength storm in the Southern Indian Ocean.

Some Antarctic fish living in the planet’s coldest waters are able to cope with the stress of rising carbon dioxide levels in the ocean. They can even tolerate slightly warmer waters. But they can’t deal with both stressors at the same time, according to a study from the University of California, Davis.