Ecoss ecologist Ted Schuur, who’s received a $600,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to establish a carbon observatory at Eight Mile Lake near Denali National Park in Alaska, calls the permafrost’s massive release of greenhouse gases into the Earth’s atmosphere a “wild card,” and potentially a tipping point, […]
Edward A. G. Schuur, a permafrost expert at Northern Arizona University, said the study was “an important and interesting calculation of where permafrost will be at some distant point in the future as we undergo climate warming.” “What’s really important is this is based on totally different assumptions,” Dr. Schuur […]
In Alaska: Too Many Fires, Not Enough Snow “Normally a cold winter would help re-freeze the soil and slow the melting of permafrost. But the warmer air might prevent that from happening now…As things warm up, places like Alaska that have a lot of carbon stored in the soil might […]
The American Geophysical Union (AGU) has partnered with NAU to implement its Bridge Program. The goal is to increase the number of students from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups obtaining graduate degrees in the geosciences. As partners with AGU’s bridge program, NAU faculty help to fulfill this goal by demonstrating […]
Ecological memory stored in a landscape can help an ecosystem recover from disturbances like fire and outbreaks of disease. But what happens when climate warming disrupts that process? How long before ecological memories stored in the warming Arctic are overwritten by new ones, and what does that mean for the […]
A study led by Northern Arizona University offers new evidence that a common framework to sort bacteria into two lifestyles doesn’t easily apply to bacteria living in wild soil. The findings, published in The ISME Journal, show that rather than bacteria falling into two major lifestyle groups—one adapted to be competitive and […]
By the end of this century, permafrost in the rapidly warming Arctic will likely emit as much carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere as a large industrial nation, and potentially more than the U.S. has emitted since the start of the industrial revolution. But that’s only one possible future […]
The Center for Ecosystem Science and Society (Ecoss) at NAU has been named one of 15 new partner institutions of the AGU Bridge Program, which works to support students in applying to and succeeding in graduate school in the Earth sciences. Ecoss and the other new partner groups join a […]
As the Arctic endures another summer of record-breaking surface air temperatures, a team from NAU, led by Ecoss’ assistant research professor Christina Schädel, has been awarded a three-year, $764,000 grant from the Department of Energy to help improve models that predict what will happen to permafrost carbon as the Arctic […]
