December 26, 2016
Professor Doug Macayeal's sound recordings of icebergs colliding were included in this NPR story. The story also contains a number of other interesting ice sounds.
December 21, 2016
William R. Kenan, Jr., Distinguished Service Professor David Jablonski, with his former postdoc Shan Huang, Geophysical Sciences alum Kaustuv Roy, and collaborator James Valentine at Berkeley, has published a paper in The American Naturalist titled, "Shaping the latitudinal diversity gradient: New perspectives from a synthesis of paleobiology and biogeography." Combining large datasets on living and fossil marine bivalves, they show that a better understanding of the most dramatic biodiversity pattern on Earth, the increase in the number and variety of species from poles to equator, requires integrating two rival approaches to incorporate both local environmental controls and the spatial movement of species out of the tropics. They argue that such "perfect storms" for mutually reinforcing factors underlie many of the major patterns in the history of life, from the great mass extinctions to the dominance of flowering plants in most terrestrial settings.
December 01, 2016
Former postdoc Won Chang, now an assistant professor at the University of Cincinnati, and associate professor Liz Moyer have a new paper out in which they predict that climate change will lead to smaller but more intense storms in the US. This result utilizes a statistical approach they developed to identify and track storms in meteorological data or high-resolution model simulations.