Alexander Thompson, a postdoctoral research associate in earth and planetary sciences in Arts & Sciences, updated simulations from an important climate model to reflect the role of changing vegetation as a key driver of global temperatures over the last 10,000 years. Thompson took evidence from pollen records and designed a set of experiments with a […]
Will the next generation have the experience to keep up with climate change? Through opportunities like recently developed experiential learning and a new environmental analysis major at WashU, college students are primed to help the rest of us understand the hard questions that we face in the 21st century — as well as the answers that […]
Scientists at Washington University in St. Louis, led by seismologist Douglas Wiens, the Robert S. Brookings Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences, recently completed one of the first seismic studies of the Patagonian Andes. In a new publication in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, they describe and map out local subsurface dynamics. The icefields that stretch for […]
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 […]