Recently appointed U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Gina McCarthy and Colorado Sen. Mark Udall will discuss President Obama’s Climate Action Plan at the University of Colorado Law School on Wednesday, Aug. 14. The event also will include a panel discussion with former Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter, Colorado Oil and Gas Association President Tisha Schuller and Brad Udall, director of the law school’s Getches-Wilkinson Center for Natural Resources, Energy and the Environment.

The spacecraft for NASA’s Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN, or MAVEN, mission to Mars being led by the University of Colorado Boulder has arrived in Florida in anticipation of a November launch. The spacecraft was shipped on Friday, Aug. 2, aboard a U.S. Air Force cargo plane from Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora, Colo., to the Shuttle Landing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center on Merritt Island, Fla. Lockheed Martin had previously assembled and tested MAVEN in its Littleton, Colo., facility.

A University of Colorado Boulder team has developed a radically new technique that uses the power of sunlight to efficiently split water into its components of hydrogen and oxygen, paving the way for the broad use of hydrogen as a clean, green fuel.

Year-round ice-free conditions across the surface of the Arctic Ocean could explain why the Earth was substantially warmer during the Pliocene Epoch than it is today, despite similar concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, according to new research carried out at the University of Colorado Boulder. In early May, instruments at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii marked a new record: The concentration of carbon dioxide climbed to 400 parts per million for the first time in modern history.

Pieter Johnson, assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at CU-Boulder, is having a pretty good year. He and a co-researcher have won an award recognizing outstanding contributions to ecology, and he has been named an Early Career Fellow by the Ecological Society of America.

Surface meltwater draining through cracks in an ice sheet can warm the sheet from the inside, softening the ice and letting it flow faster, according to a new study by scientists at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Two University of Colorado Boulder faculty members have received prestigious CAREER Awards from the National Science Foundation. NSF Faculty Early Career Development, or CAREER, Awards recognize talented young faculty members with grants to support outstanding research projects and to encourage the integration of teaching and research.

Many photographs of the Southeast’s Smoky Mountains show layers of tall hills, shading to purples and grays in the distance. Tiny particles in the atmosphere help create the effect, which makes for stunning pictures. But human-caused enhancements of those fine particles also contribute to poor air quality in the Southeastern U.S., and may help explain why the region has not warmed like the rest of the nation.

The amount of dust being blown across the landscape has increased over the last 17 years in large swaths of the West, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder. The escalation in dust emissions — which may be due to the interplay of several factors, including increased windstorm frequency, drought cycles and changing land-use patterns — has implications both for the areas where the dust is first picked up by the winds and for the places where the dust is put back down.

A chemical reaction between iron-containing minerals and water may produce enough hydrogen “food” to sustain microbial communities living in pores and cracks within the enormous volume of rock below the ocean floor and parts of the continents, according to a new study led by the University of Colorado Boulder. The findings, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, also hint at the possibility that hydrogen-dependent life could have existed where iron-rich igneous rocks on Mars were once in contact with water.