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There are an estimated 54,000 glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalayas. These glaciers cover 60,000 square kilometers and serve as a major source of the water in the region’s rivers, including as much as 40 percent in the Indus River system - the backbone of agriculture and food production in Pakistan, for example. But in recent decades glaciologists – those who study glaciers – are concerned with how fast Himalayan glaciers are melting, and what that could mean for the more than a billion people downstream who depend on these glaciers for agriculture, fresh water, energy production, and basic livelihood.
Smriti Srivastava is a Wilkes Center Postdoctoral Research Associate in the School of Environment, Society & Sustainability at the University of Utah. She has studied Himalayan glaciers throughout her academic and research career, which has included several field expeditions to study the glaciers up close.
(Featured image: Smriti Srivastava’s photo of her research team led by Prof. Mohd. Farooq Azam, with the Indian Institute of Technology Indore, while hiking the Drang-Drung Glacier at 5300 m a.s.l in September 2023, one of the largest glaciers in the Himalaya-Karakoram mountain range. Photo credit: Himanshu Kaushik)
https://wilkescenter.utah.edu/podcast/26-sizing-up-the-melting-glaciers-of-the-himalayas/
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It’s true the Earth has experienced periods of global warming in its past. The largest such warming event in the past 90 million years - since the time dinosaurs roamed Earth - was the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, about 56 million years ago. Average global temperatures increased by 4–5°C over a period of 3,000–10,000 years. Human beings were definitely not walking the Earth back then, but today scientists are able to piece together evidence of how and why this ancient global warming happened.
Spoiler alert? It was caused by greenhouse gas emissions, likely stemming from carbon cycle feedbacks – the processes that unlocked and released more and more CO2 from the Earth’s surface as it warmed, and volcanism - the eruption of volcanoes.
Dustin Harper is a marine geologist postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Utah. He, along with U Geology professor Gabe Bowen, published a study where they examined tiny, microscopic shell fossils taken from drilling cores in the ocean floor, that revealed important information about ancient sea surface temperatures and the levels of atmospheric CO2 . They found sea surface temperatures were closely linked with levels of atmospheric CO2 during this period.
This helps us to understand the sensitivities of our planet and the feedback mechanisms that can kick in during periods of rapid global warming triggered by greenhouse gas emissions, which is what we are experiencing today – with anthropogenic climate change - albeit at a much faster rate. Like, 4 to 10 times faster than occurred during those ancient hyperthermal events.
https://wilkescenter.utah.edu/podcast/25-climate-sherlocking-dustin-harper/ -
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"Eco-anxiety" or "Climate grief" are increasingly part of our lexicon when it comes to describing the heavy feelings of concern people are feeling about the state of our natural environment and global climate change. This past year, Jennifer Follstad Shah, associate professor in the School of the Environment, Society and Sustainability, along with her colleague Andrea Brunelle, and other co-PIs on the project including Adrienne Cachelin, Monika Lohani, Sara Yeo, and Lynne Zummo conducted a study among undergraduate students across the University of Utah to ascertain how students are experiencing symptoms of eco-anxiety, and to understand how students are effectively coping with it. In September 2024, they presented their results, and so I wanted to talk with Jennifer and Andrea them both to learn more.
https://wilkescenter.utah.edu/podcast/24-climate-anxiety-at-the-u/ -
Dr. Jon Wang, an Assistant Professor in the School of Biological Sciences here at the U, manages the Dynamic Carbon and Ecosystems Lab, or DYCE Lab. He has access to high-resolution airborne laser scanning data to map forests across the world to measure to set benchmarks for that data and monitor for changes. Wang is interested in how climate change and human activity are rapidly transforming terrestrial ecosystems such as with wildfire, timber harvest, urbanization, and drought. Dr. Jon Wang’s work could be crucial to understand how forests are changing as the world looks to applying nature-based climate solutions in the coming years.
wilkescenter.utah.edu/podcast/23-monitoring-forests-as-they-change/ -
In September this year, the Wilkes Center for Climate Science and Policy awarded Applied Carbon, the climate tech company based in Houston, Texas, the $500,000 Wilkes Climate Launch Prize.
Applied Carbon, formerly Climate Robotics, is a technology company designing automated biochar production machines that convert in-field agricultural crop waste into biochar.
Jason Aramburu, who is a Co-founder and CEO of the company, has researched biochar since he was an undergraduate student at Princeton, and in the last 15 years he and a partner have been developing a technology to utilize biochar for large commercial agricultural operations.
Biochar was in fact produced by Indigenous farmers in Central and South America for thousands of years to improve crop yields. It is made heating plant matter to high temperatures and applying it to the soil. And, as it turns out, biochar could also be a promising and durable way to remove excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Jason Aramburu visited Salt Lake City to receive the Wilkes Climate Prize, and I was fortunate to have some time to talk with him about the success of his biochar startup, and how he envisions his biochar technology becoming a climate change solution and making a positive impact on commercial agriculture more broadly.
wilkescenter.utah.edu/podcast/22-interview-with-applied-carbon/
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Austin Green is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Biology with the College of Science’s Science Research Initiative, or SRI program. His specialty is using camera traps to monitor and capture image data of wildlife in wilderness areas. His research involves gathering this data to study wild animal behavior, their movement patterns, and how human behavior is impacting wildlife. Some of his research has suggested that climate change is making life harder for wildlife to adapt to urbanization, especially in hotter and dryer areas. Austin hopes his research will help people understand the wildlife that live around us, and for better urban planning that accounts for the needs of local wildlife.
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If you’ve taken a hike or a drive through northern Utah’s forests recently, you may have noticed that some areas of the forests are changing and looking a little sick. Northern Utah’s forests are increasingly experiencing an infestation of a tiny non-native insect called balsam woolly adelgid (or BWA), that’s slowly attacking subalpine fir which are among the most common conifers in the Wasatch Mountains. Dr. Mickey Campbell was the lead author of a recently published study that maps the spread of balsam woolly adelgid in Utah. He’s a research assistant professor in the Department of Geography (soon to be renamed the School of Environment, Society, and Sustainability.) I had the chance to talk with him about doing the study and what it means for the future of our forests, as well as his generally philosophy on doing solutions-focused science that can hopefully lead to real-life impacts to policies and practices. So, with that, here’s our conversation.
Website:
wilkescenter.utah.edu/podcast/20-mapping-the-infestation-of-balsam-woolly-adelgid-in-utah-forests/ -
For this episode we talk with Dr. Marie Jackson a Research Professor in the Geology & Geophysics department here at the University of Utah. Dr. Jackson’s work is centered in mineralogy, pyroclastic volcanism, and material science, but she applies her work to the realms of engineering, archeology, and more. She’s done a lot of pioneering work on understanding ancient Roman concrete, their composition, structure and how they age over time. Working to make a modern proxy of the concrete has been a more recent project of hers. By working on how to make more sustainable, resilient concrete her work will help to lessen carbon emissions and combat the environmental impacts that come with a changing climate.
https://wilkescenter.utah.edu/podcast/19-the-significance-of-ancient-roman-concrete-for-a-decarbonizing-world/
(Featured image: ROMACONS drilling at a marine structure in Portus Cosanus, Tuscany, 2003. Drilling is by permission of the Soprintendenza Archeologia per la Toscana.) -
Zoe Exelbert studies birds at the Great Salt Lake. Specifically, she’s interested in how climate change and shifting weather patterns are affecting bird migrations and in turn, how this is impacting the overall ecosystem of Great Salt Lake. Exelbert is a Data Science and environmental studies undergraduate student here at the U. She says understanding the ways these migratory birds are changing their behaviors could be indicative of how we as human are also changing -- and may continue to adapt -- in response to climate changes.
https://wilkescenter.utah.edu/podcast/18-how-great-salt-lake-bird-migrations-are-changing/ -
The new Climate of Hope exhibit at the Natural History Museum of Utah offers museum visitors a more localized and solutions-oriented framing of climate change than other exhibits have done in past years. In this episode, exhibit developer Lisa Thompson and Lynne Zummo, the curator of Learning Sciences at NHMU, take us through the interactive exhibit where they are gathering important data that may improve communication techniques and strategies in years to come.
wilkescenter.utah.edu/podcast/17-how-climate-of-hope-exhibit-improve-climate-communication-strategies/ -
For this episode we talk with Dr. Alexandra Ponette-Gonzalez, an Associate Professor in the Department of City and Metropolitan Planning and Curator of Urban ecology at the Natural History Museum of Utah. Ponette-Gonzalez’s work focuses primarily on urban ecology. She studies forests and trees and how they interact with the atmosphere and urban environments. She’s done a lot of cutting edge research on things like urban ecology, urban black carbon, and what happens to smoke and dust. By studying how we humans impact our urban ecosystems, which in turn impacts the climate, she hopes to better understand what the future could look like, and where climate solutions may exist in urban environments.
https://wilkescenter.utah.edu/podcast/16-urban-plants-black-carbon/ -
The Wilkes Center held its second annual Climate Solutions Hackathon on January 26th. This was not a coding “hackathon” but a competition to find innovative solutions to the daunting challenges of climate change-driven wildfires. U students were asked to form teams, choose one of five themes to focus their solution, and accomplish this in 24 hours. Ultimately, the Wilkes Center received a total of 17 submissions, with 3 teams winning the top prizes. In this episode I share my interviews with each of the winning teams to learn who they are, what their solutions are, and how they came up with them.
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Listeners to the podcast are very likely familiar with the concept of carbon offsetting or carbon credits. This is the idea that a company that pollutes in the course of its business practice can purchase carbon credits, often in the form of supporting tree planting somewhere in the world, with a promise that doing this will remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, to “offset” or balance-out the company’s carbon pollution. This has become a billion-dollar global market.
But in recent years this practice has experienced a crisis of credibility. An increasing number of investigations and studies have eroded confidence in carbon markets. The carbon offsets for some projects were over-counted, while others didn’t actually prevent deforestation, and still other carbon credit forest projects appear to be much more vulnerable to wildfires or insect outbreaks than previously believed.
So, what is to be done? Can the carbon offsetting approach be fixed? Or, is a totally different approach needed?
Libby Blanchard, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Wilkes Center, and the School of Biological Sciences here at the U of U, says that billions of crucial funding would best be spent on a contribution approach for effective forest efforts that don't undermine urgent climate action. She recently co-authored an op-ed with other scholars in the Stanford Social Innovation Review journal to make the case for this new approach.
wilkescenter.utah.edu/podcast/14-should-contributions-replace-carbon-offsets/ -
One of the many challenges facing the world in the coming decades to reach carbon neutrality - in order for climate change to stabilize – is the challenge of both capturing and sequestering carbon dioxide that is emitted from power plants and putting it underground. This is what is called Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage. And accomplishing this on a large scale will be necessary all across the world to meet carbon emissions reduction goals laid out by the Paris Climate Agreement.
It turns out that Utah has some high potential to become a reservoir for captured CO2. A number of state and federal agencies and research institutions like the University of Utah have been exploring this possibility for a few decades already. And one person involved with this work is Liz Mahon, a Wilkes Center Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Utah. I recently had the chance to sit down and talk with her about her work. https://wilkescenter.utah.edu/podcast/13-can-we-bury-co2-in-utahs-ancient-sand/
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Understanding how volatile organic compounds (VOCs) that originate from living organisms like trees and plants could influence climate change and air pollution is an important area of research. Recently I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with Alfred Mayhew, who is postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences here at the U. Alfred did his earlier graduate and PHD work at the University of York in the UK.
Dr. Mayhew’s research is focused on the intersection between air quality and climate change, and the very complex chemical interactions between biogenic volatile organic compounds. By trying to better understand how certain interactions take place between compounds and how significant they are for understanding and forecasting air pollution and climate change, he hopes his work will provide direction and focus for future lab and field researchers, and policymakers interested in understanding the climate feedback between the biosphere, atmosphere, and anthropogenic emissions.
This was a fascinating, and times challenging topic for me to wrap my head around, and Aflie was very gracious and patient to help get me up to speed on his work. I hope you enjoy our conversation. -
What does it take for whole cities to take the actions necessary to adapt to a changing climate? What is required for millions of people who live in the same metropolis to agree to certain changes to become resilient to climate change-driven natural disasters? These are the questions that Malcolm Araos has been asking.
Malcolm Araos is a Wilkes Center post-doctoral student in the Department of Geography. Previously Araos, who is originally from Canada, was a PhD student in Sociology at New York University where he researched the process for how the city of New York began changing its infrastructure to become more resilient to sea level rise and future hurricanes in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, which caused mass flooding and destruction in 2012.
As a postdoctoral student now at the University of Utah, Araos has turned his attention to the Great Salt Lake. He is just beginning to examine how millions of Utahns living on the Wasatch Front are confronting problems of dust and air pollution stemming from the shrinking lake levels.
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As scientists, policymakers, and other environmentally-concerned individuals search for solutions to the changing climate, glaciers are an important topic. With the ability to both study glaciers in their current states, and use geomorphology and numerical modeling to understand the historical placements of glaciers in the past, they hold clues for interpreting the climate.
Dr. Leif Anderson has been studying glaciers since the completion of his undergraduate degree at Montana State University-Bozeman. After completing his Ph.D. at the University of Colorado - Boulder, he studied geomorphology and glacialology through two postdoctoral appointments in Iceland and Germany.
Dr. Anderson, an assistant professor at the University of Utah, spends his time researching both the past extent of glaciers and the current conditions of glacial ice and how the changing environment is impacting them. By combining the information he learns with other scientific understandings, his research is helping to understand a future changing climate. -
For the world to meet the goal of the 2015 Paris climate agreement to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” by mid-century, scientists say removing greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere will be essential. Dozens of companies have been created and billions of dollars spent already for carbon dioxide removal. But another greenhouse gas getting a lot more attention for different reasons is methane.
Methane is critical for many reasons. The relative concentration of methane in the atmosphere has grown more than twice as fast as carbon dioxide since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Removing methane from the atmosphere could mean reducing future temperatures even faster than just removing carbon dioxide alone because methane is about 81 times more potent in terms of warming the climate in its initial 20 years after its release. Tackling methane emissions could also be one of the most cost-effective ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions for fossil fuel producers. And removing Methane pollution from the atmosphere would improve air quality by decreasing the concentration near ground-level ozone which causes an estimated one million premature deaths every year from respiratory illnesses.
Dr. Jessica Swanson, Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Utah, has focused her research endeavors on the emerging science of atmospheric methane capture. Her research group – the Swanson Group – has decades of experience modeling enzymes central to bioenergetic transformations and developing kinetic models of complex processes. In this episode Dr. Swanson talks about what it’s like to work in this exciting and quickly growing research and development space.
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Ricardo Rubio grew up in the borderlands region of southwestern Texas where he came to recognize the challenges and vulnerabilities that communities like his increasingly face because of the compounded effects of water scarcity, political disempowerment, infrastructure scarcity, and climate change. Rubio is a doctoral student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Utah and his research is part of a University of Utah College of Science SRI Stream, the Science Research Initiative, called “Big Data for Climate Science.” He is also a Research Assistant under Dr. Sara Grineski at the Center for Natural and Technological Hazards at the University of Utah. In this episode, Rubio talks about his work investigating social disparities in the face of climate change-related hazards and disasters, and what he is learning by documenting the water challenges impacting communities along the southern border and identifying possible solutions.
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Nicholas Witham, a fifth-year biomedical engineering Ph.D. student at the U, won first place in the Wilkes Student Innovation Prize competition in May 2023 for his proposal titled, "Renewable Energy And Carbon Capture With Thermomotive Biopolymer Textiles." His idea proposes a novel renewable energy system that generates power through the daily heating and nightly cooling of the earth, known as the diurnal temperature variation. This can be accomplished using a type of artificial muscle known as a twisted coiled polymer actuator, which can be designed to either contract or expand when heated.
For this episode we are sharing an interview Nick Witham did with Chis Nelson on the U Rising Podcast, in which describes his winning idea as well as his efforts to create prosthetic limbs that affordable and accessible.
- Visa fler
