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Holly Barnard wins Boulder Faculty Assembly Excellence Award
February 16th, 2021The Boulder Faculty Assembly has awarded INSTAAR Fellow Holly Barnard an Excellence Award for leadership and service.
Finding “glocal” solutions to flooding problems
February 3rd, 2021Scientists call for joint efforts to combine real-time global rainfall data with high-resolution local hydrology to better forecast floods.
Our place in the food security chain
January 27th, 2021Food insecurity is a growing threat in many places around the world. This situation is exacerbated by two events that many geoscientists are tasked to study: natural hazards and our changing climate. The February issue of Eos, organized by Ben Zaitchik and Merritt Turetsky, looks at how geoscientists are using their research to help create resilient communities around the world that can always be sure of food in their pantries.
2020 rivals hottest year on record, pushing Earth closer to a critical climate threshold
January 15th, 2021The year 2020, which witnessed terrifying blazes from California to Siberia and a record number of tropical cyclones in the Atlantic, rivaled and possibly even equaled the hottest year on record, according to multiple scientific announcements Thursday. Experts said that another year as hot as 2016 coming so soon suggests a swift step up the climate escalator. And it implies that a momentous new temperature record - breaching the critical 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) warming threshold for the first time - could occur as soon as later this decade.
Long-term emissions cuts are needed to slow ocean acidification
January 4th, 2021During the first half of 2020, global greenhouse gas emissions dropped by about nine percent in the midst of the COVID-19 outbreak. People around the world reported seeing signs that “nature was healing” as a result of a steep decline in human activities such as transportation and production. However, a new study from UC Boulder has shown that the positive changes seen in natural ecosystems were not reflected throughout Earth’s oceans.
Nice to Know podcast: Xmas Special 2020: Studying Climate Change at the North Pole with Bruce Vaughn
December 22nd, 2020Climate change - we all know that it's happening, but how do we actually know this scientifically? Bruce Vaughn studies glaciers up at the North Pole, looking at ice cores to study how our climate has changed over the Earth's history. We talk about how this is done, and also how we are now entering uncharted territory of atmospheric CO2, warming, and what we as a species can do about it.