New study calculates retreat of glacier edges in Alaska’s Kenai Fjords National Park
Peer-Reviewed Publication
As glaciers worldwide retreat due to climate change, managers of national parks need to know what’s on the horizon to prepare for the future. A new study from the University of Washington and the U.S. National Park Service has measured 38 years of change for glaciers in Kenai Fjords National Park south of Anchorage and discovered that 13 of the 19 glaciers show substantial retreat, four are relatively stable, and two have advanced. It also finds trends in which glacier types are disappearing fastest. The new data for these glaciers provide a baseline to study how climate change — including warmer air temperatures, as well as changes in both the types and amount of precipitation — will continue to affect glaciers as the impacts of climate change accumulate.
In recognition of our outstanding expertise in quantum research: a consortium consisting of eleven researchers from Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) will receive roughly three million euros in funding by 2025. The new lighthouse project Quantum Measurement and Control for the Enablement of Quantum Computing and Quantum Sensing (QuMeCo) will ignite basic research into quantum computing, sensing and imaging, combining physics and electrical engineering in new ways in the field of light and matter.
The different geographic and climatic regions from which ragweed pollen originates, as well as the degree of environmental pollution, may influence the severity of allergic reactions such as hay fever and asthma. Pollen from plants in different areas exhibit different levels of aggressiveness. This is the conclusion reached by an inter-university study team led by MedUni Vienna and involving the University of Vienna and the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences. The study was recently published in the journal "Frontiers in Allergy".
Grasslands, which constitute almost 40% of the terrestrial biosphere, provide habitat for a great diversity of animals and plants and contribute to the livelihoods of more than 1 billion people worldwide. Whereas the destruction and degradation of grasslands can occur rapidly, recent work indicates that complete recovery of biodiversity and essential functions occurs slowly or not at all. Grassland restoration—interventions to speed or guide this recovery—has received less attention than restoration of forested ecosystems, often due to the prevailing assumption that grasslands are recently formed habitats that can reassemble quickly. Viewing grassland restoration as long-term assembly toward old-growth endpoints, with appreciation of feedbacks and threshold shifts, will be crucial for recognizing when and how restoration can guide recovery of this globally important ecosystem.
New, easily fabricated, high performance carbon microlattice electrodes could soon be used to make cheaper batteries powered by readily available sodium ions. The approach was published by Tohoku University researchers and colleagues in the journal Small.
New, easily fabricated, high performance carbon microlattice electrodes could soon be used to make cheaper batteries powered by readily available sodium ions. The approach was published by Tohoku University researchers and colleagues in the journal Small.
Researchers have found that California’s forest carbon buffer pool, designed to ensure the durability of the state’s multi-billion-dollar carbon offset program, is severely undercapitalized. The results show that, within the offset program’s first 10 years, estimated carbon losses from wildfires have depleted at least 95% of the contributions set aside to protect against all fire risks over 100 years. This means that the buffer pool is unable to guarantee that credited forest carbon remains out of the atmosphere for at least 100 years. The results, published in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change, illustrate that the program, one of the world’s largest, is likely not meeting its set requirements.