For more than a decade, Derek Hoeferlin has studied the Mekong, Mississippi and Rhine (above) river basins, with a particular focus on multi-scaled, water-based infrastructural transformation. The three basins — detailed in Hoeferlin’s upcoming book Way Beyond Bigness: The Need for Watershed Architecture — reflect three different hydrological scales in three different states of management and development. […]
About 70% of the world’s tropical glaciers, already a rarity, are located in the highlands of Peru. But they are rapidly disappearing. Changes in Peru’s glacier area have been the focus of several research studies; one such study, in the journal The Cryosphere (published Sept. 30, 2019), reported a drastic reduction of almost 30% in the area covered […]
Anthropologist T.R. Kidder in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis published new research that shows that aridification in the central plains of China during the early Bronze Age did not cause population collapse. The results highlight the importance of social resilience to climate change. Climate alone is not a driver for human […]
Two Washington University educators have developed a high school chemistry curriculum based on real-life impacts and data, including figures from the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The new curriculum is co-authored by Michael E. Wysession, a professor in earth and planetary sciences, and Bryn Lutes, a lecturer in chemistry, both in Arts & […]
Research, led by Vanessa Ezenwa, a professor of ecology at the University of Georgia, and funded by the Living Earth Collaborative at Washington University in St. Louis, describes how parasites can cause animals to produce more methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. Methane is a greenhouse gas with an effect on global warming 28-36 times more potent than carbon […]
Washington University in St. Louis researcher Bronwen Konecky is piecing together a story about Earth’s climatic history — and what it can tell us about our planet’s future. Konecky, an assistant professor in Earth & planetary sciences, conducts fieldwork in tropical areas from Peru to Uganda to Southeast Asia collecting and analyzing rainwater samples and […]
Tristram R. “T.R.” Kidder, the Edward S. and Tedi Macias Professor of Anthropology in Arts & Sciences, has long studied the changes that humans have wrought on the land. In 2014, he published the earliest known archaeological evidence for human construction of large-scale levees and other flood-control systems in China — arguing that ancient levees […]
The international Lancet Commission on Obesityreleased its major new reportJan. 27. The main takeaway? Obesity, climate change and hunger are inextricably linked and must be fought as one challenge. Ross Hammond, the Betty Bofinger Brown Associate Professor, and Peter Hovmand, director of the Social System Design Laband professor of practice, both of the Brown School at Washington University in […]
Could 3D printing change the way buildings are made? That was the question explored by a team of Washington University in St. Louis students from the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and the School of Engineering & Applied Science. With support from the International Center for Energy, Environment and Sustainability (InCEES), the team […]
Washington University has joined 16 other leading research universities that comprise the University Climate Change Coalition (UC3). UC3 is a new network of institutions from across North America formed on Feb. 6 at the 2018 Higher Education Climate Leadership Summit, committed to leveraging its combined institutional strength to foster a robust exchange of best practices and […]