Campus News

As climates change, the lush tropical ecosystems of the Amazon Basin may release more of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than they absorb, according to a new study published Feb. 6 in Nature .

If you were a shrew snuffling around a North American forest, you would be 27 times less likely to respond to climate change than if you were a moose grazing nearby. That is just one of the findings of a new University of Colorado Boulder assessment led by Assistant Professor Christy McCain that looked at more than 1,000 different scientific studies on North American mammal responses to human-caused climate change.

University of Colorado Boulder Professor Peter Molnar has been awarded the prestigious 2014 Crafoord Prize in Geosciences by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for his groundbreaking research in geophysics and geological sciences.

The University of Colorado Boulder’s Senior Vice Chancellor and Chief Financial Officer Kelly Fox today announced that Vice Chancellor for Administration Louise Vale will retire effective March 14. “Louise has had a distinguished career providing financial management and strategic direction to the University of Colorado for over 20 years and she will be greatly missed,” Fox said. Fox has named Steve Thweatt, who is currently assistant vice chancellor for Facilities Management, as interim vice chancellor for administration starting March 15.

Two faculty members in the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Engineering and Applied Science have been honored with the National Science Foundation’s prestigious CAREER award. The NSF Faculty Early Career Development, or CAREER, award supports junior faculty members who demonstrate excellence in research and who effectively integrate their research with education. CU-Boulder’s recent recipients are Prashant Nagpal, an assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering, and Franck Vernerey, an assistant professor of civil, environmental and architectural engineering.

Power plants that use natural gas and a new technology to squeeze more energy from the fuel release far less of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide than coal-fired power plants do, according to a new analysis accepted for publication Jan. 8 in Earth’s Future , a journal of the American Geophysical Union .

Trees with smoother bark are better at repelling attacks by mountain pine beetles, which have difficulty gripping the slippery surface, according to a new study by the University of Colorado Boulder. The findings, published online in the journal Functional Ecology , may help land managers make decisions about which trees to cull and which to keep in order to best protect forested properties against pine beetle infestation.

A searchable, comparative law database outlining water quality regulations for Colorado and other states experiencing shale oil and gas development is now available on LawAtlas.org. The Oil & Gas - Water Quality database project is led by the University of Colorado Boulder’s Intermountain Oil and Gas Best Management Practices (BMP) Project in partnership with Temple University’s Public Health Law Research program and its LawAtlas.org website.

Scientists recently recorded the lowest temperatures on Earth at a desolate and remote ice plateau in East Antarctica, trumping a record set in 1983 and uncovering a new puzzle about the ice-covered continent. Glaciologist Ted Scambos and his team found temperatures from −92 to −94 degrees Celsius (−134 to −137 degrees Fahrenheit) in a 1,000-kilometer long swath on the highest section of the East Antarctic ice divide. Scambos is lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, which is a part of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder.

A new National Research Council report calls for the development of an early warning system that could help society better anticipate sudden changes resulting from climate change and their impacts on society, says a University of Colorado Boulder faculty member who chaired the committee that produced the report.