Camels have evolved a seemingly counterintuitive approach to keeping cool while conserving water in a scorching desert environment: They have a thick coat of insulating fur. 

Climate change is causing hurricanes that make landfall to take more time to weaken, reports a study published today in leading journal, Nature.

Plastic has become ubiquitous in modern life and its accumulation as waste in the environment is sounding warning bells for the health of humans and wildlife.

Across the continental United States, massive, often-devastating precipitation events — the kind that climate scientists have long called “hundred-year storms” — could become three times more likely and 20% more severe by 2079.

Biologists used to studying endangered Southern Resident killer whales spent almost a week in September on a whole different kind of effort.

August wildfires burned tens of thousands of acres in seven UC natural reserves, including a quarter of UC Berkeley’s Hastings Natural History Reservation in Carmel Valley.

Campus sustainability encompasses a broad range of actions and choices—some of which are subtle, while others are eye-catching.

A Texas A&M professor, in collaboration with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, received a Department of Energy grant to develop a system in engineered barriers to isolate and contain nuclear fuel waste.

When the pandemic forced Bay Area residents to shelter in place in March, chemist Ron Cohen saw an opportunity to see how air quality was affected.

Scientists have detected what they say are the sediments of a huge ancient lake bed sealed more than a mile under the ice of northwest Greenland—the first-ever discovery of such a sub-glacial feature anywhere in the world. Apparently formed at a time when the area was ice-free but now completely frozen in, the lake bed may be hundreds of thousands or millions of years old, and contain unique fossil and chemical traces of past climates and life. Scientists consider such data vital to understanding what the Greenland ice sheet may do in coming years as climate warms, and thus the site makes a tantalizing target for drilling. A paper describing the discovery is in press at the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters.

“This could be an important repository of information, in a landscape that right now is totally concealed and inaccessible,” said Guy Paxman, a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and lead author of the report. “We’re working to try and understand how the Greenland ice sheet has behaved in the past. It’s important if we want to understand how it will behave in future decades.” The ice sheet, which has been melting at an accelerating pace in recent years, contains enough water to raise global sea levels by about 24 feet.

The researchers mapped out the lake bed by analyzing data from airborne geophysical instruments that can read signals that penetrate the ice and provide images of the geologic structures below. Most of the data came from aircraft flying at low altitude over the ice sheet as part of NASA’s Operation IceBridge.

Read more at: Earth Institute at Columbia University

The largely featureless surface of the Greenland ice sheet, as seen from the window of a P3 aircraft carrying geophysical instruments aimed at detecting geologic features underneath. (Photo Credit: Kirsty Tinto/Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory)