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Amphibians, Reptiles, & Natural History
Amphibians, Reptiles, & Natural History
Even after one of the largest environmental remediation efforts in California history, dangerous levels of lead persist in residential neighborhoods surrounding a former battery smelter in Southeast Los Angeles, according to a new study from the University of California, Irvine’s Joe C. Wen School of Population & Public Health. The research is published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. The findings reveal a serious public health failure while also highlighting the power of community-driven research to hold institutions accountable and drive meaningful change.
Researchers at the Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo and George Mason University’s College of Science have developed a new method that improves air temperature forecasts one to five weeks in advance—without requiring additional model simulations. The methodology, detailed in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, provides a dual benefit, not requiring significant increase in computational cost while improving predictions.
In Puerto Rico, drought doesn’t always arrive slowly. Sometimes, it appears in days. That speed can leave producers scrambling, reservoirs dropping, and communities facing water restrictions before they can react. In a place often associated with heavy rain and hurricanes, drought is often overlooked, but very much a reality. New research from Virginia Tech is helping explain why.
An understanding of community resilience and risk analysis is vital when it comes to protecting civilians and infrastructure from natural hazards, such as hurricanes or earthquakes. Artificial intelligence is an efficient way to rate a community’s resilience and vulnerability. However, factors that affect community resilience—like power grids and communications systems—are ranked independently by current assessment methods based on the assumed impact of each factor.
It transports far more than 100 times as much water as all of the Earth’s rivers combined: The Antarctic Circumpolar Current rushes around the southern continent unhindered by land masses and is therefore a fundamental component of the climate system. In a recent study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a research team led by the Alfred Wegener Institute describes how and when this mighty ring current developed in Earth’s history.
Scientists have found a new way to detect subtle chemical signatures in seawater, revealing previously invisible details about the ocean’s chemistry from data continuously collected by thousands of autonomous robotic floats drifting across the seas.
Wildfires are becoming more frequent and are ravaging new parts of the world due to global warming. A study led by researchers from the University of Gothenburg shows that this change is increasing the vulnerability of thousands of plants, animals and fungi.
Imagine a dump truck dropping 13 tons of dirt into the waters of Brush Creek, a waterway that feeds northwest Arkansas’ primary drinking water source, Beaver Lake. That’s how much soil and sediment researchers measured going into the stream as runoff due to a single large storm event.
Mangrove forests are natural wonders that protect coastal areas, particularly in tropical and subtropical regions. They are able to dissipate wave energy and limit flooding, which can even mitigate tsunamis and coastal inundations during tropical cyclones. For this reason, mangroves are attracting attention as Nature-based Solutions, or NbS: natural infrastructure with the potential to enhance coastal resilience in an environmentally friendly way.
A United Nations-backed framework for protecting tropical forests could allow governments to collect income from carbon credits without advancing forest conservation. The weakness lies in how the program calculates baselines, which is the expected rate of deforestation without intervention. There is no evidence that enrolled jurisdictions—countries, states, and provinces—have acted on that opportunity, but the incentive structure favors those who do, according to a study by Yale researchers appearing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The framework also penalizes the jurisdictions that are in most need of intervention.
Some newly published findings from an Idaho State University professor and his colleagues point out how changes to currents an ocean away can impact climates on the other side of the globe. The new paper published in Nature Communications explains how Bruce Finney, professor in the departments of biological sciences and geosciences at ISU, and his collaborators, Lesleigh Anderson, research geologist with the United States Geological Survey, and W. Brad Baxter, Idaho State alum, came to understand how shifts in currents in the Atlantic Ocean led the climate of Alaska to cool, especially in winter, roughly 13,000 years ago.
Reducing aircraft soot emissions may not reduce contrail clouds, according to in-flight observations of emissions from a passenger jet with modern “lean-burn” engines, reported in Nature. Contrails from aircraft contribute to the climate-warming impacts of aviation. The findings demonstrate that more work is needed to understand and reduce the climate impact of jet engine emissions.
A growing network of meltwater lakes at the edge of the Greenland ice sheet is accelerating the flow of major glaciers, potentially increasing the pace of global sea-level rise. Warmer air and sea temperatures have led to the loss of around 264 gigatons of ice every year in Greenland since 2002, causing sea levels to rise by 0.8 millimeters annually. But a new study by the University of Leeds examining glacier behavior across the entire ice sheet has highlighted a lesser-known feature that is amplifying this mass loss—the freshwater lakes forming as the ice retreats.
Rivers are rarely the calm, orderly streams we imagine on maps. Over time, their winding paths—called meanders—shift, bend, and occasionally snap off in sudden “cutoff” events that shorten loops and reshape the landscape. While scientists have long suspected that such cutoffs inject a dose of unpredictability into river evolution, a new study published in Communications Earth & Environment demonstrates that these abrupt events are, by themselves, enough to produce chaos in river channels.
Researchers have uncovered new evidence that short-lived spikes in ocean phosphorus may have played a major role in two of the most severe marine extinctions in Earth’s history. Dr. Matthew Dodd from The University of Western Australia’s School of Earth and Oceans is lead author of the study published in Nature Communications, which sheds new light on how nutrient disruption can destabilize life, climate, and ocean chemistry on a global scale.
The Syrian civil war, which began in 2011, caused widespread population displacement and infrastructure damage. However, it has also led to an unintended environmental effect with notable changes in the country’s landscape, according to a new study published in Geophysical Research Letters. Among the concerns are the complex impacts of wars on water resources. These repercussions can be direct, such as wastewater pollution and destruction of water infrastructure, or indirect, including increased deforestation, soil erosion, and abrupt cropland losses.
In a first-of-its-kind study, a team of researchers led by geoscientist Michael Rawlins at the University of Massachusetts Amherst has shown in fine-grained detail what happens when Arctic permafrost thaws. Focusing on a Wisconsin-sized area of Alaska’s North Slope containing hundreds of rivers and streams flowing into the Beaufort Sea, the team analyzed 44 years of model data at one-kilometer grid resolution, revealing how massively runoff is increasing, the increased loads of previously frozen carbon flowing through northern Alaska’s rivers and how the thawing season has extended into late-summer and fall.
Communities worldwide rely on reservoirs for drinking water, hydroelectric power, irrigation, and more. These critical freshwater resources are affected by seasonal and long-term changes; water levels in reservoirs can dip during hot summer months or due to prolonged drought, or can flood after a particularly strong storm. Despite their importance, there are key gaps in our knowledge of reservoir structure and dynamics. Two recent papers published in Scientific Data use Landsat data to help fill in those gaps.
We are what we eat. And in the ocean, most life-forms source their food from phytoplankton. These microscopic, plant-like algae are the primary food source for krill, sea snails, some small fish, and jellyfish, which in turn feed larger marine animals that are prey for the ocean’s top predators, including humans.
New modeling shows almost one in three Americans will routinely breathe air considered unhealthy for sensitive people by the year 2100 due to climate change, a seven-fold increase compared to the turn of the century.
A new study shows that systems designed to capture methane from cow manure, called dairy digesters, are highly effective. But on the rare occasions they fail, the leaks are large enough to offset their climate benefits.
As global temperatures climb, rainfall patterns are shifting in ways that could put water resources and agriculture under increasing strain, a new study published in Water Resources Research suggests.
An international team of scientists is warning that everyday antibacterial soaps, wipes, sprays, and other “germ-killing” products are quietly contributing to the global rise of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) while providing no added health benefit for most consumer uses.
Wild animals are not just inhabitants of the natural world. Many also act as natural landscape engineers, reshaping Earth’s surface as they burrow, feed, and build shelters that move soil and sediment across ecosystems. From animals disturbing riverbeds to burrowing species redistributing soil, wildlife constantly modifies the physical structure of landscapes through everyday activities.
Earth has already exceeded its ability to support the global population sustainably, with new research warning of increasing pressure on food security, climate stability, and human well-being. However, slowing population growth and raising global awareness could still offer humanity some hope.
Volcanoes are both captivating and disastrous. Most are likely familiar with the common short-term dangers associated with them: explosive forces, lava, and even atmospheric particles disrupting air traffic. But researchers also explore longer-term impacts of eruptions, as their contributions to broader climate patterns are important, but not well understood. For example, it’s known that ejected material can reach high into the atmosphere and cause local or even global cooling to some degree.
Experiments by University of Leeds researchers, published in Earth’s Future, have shown that thawing of permafrost makes it between 25 and 100 times more permeable, allowing more climate change forcing gases to escape.