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 […]
PhD and MS positions in Ecosystem Ecology are available in the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society (Ecoss) at Northern Arizona University. Graduate student benefits include a stipend (teaching assistantship or research assistantship), tuition waiver, health insurance, and payment of non-tuition fees. The Ecoss mission is to conduct high-impact, innovative […]
The abrupt thawing of permafrost may affect up to half of all carbon stored in the layer of frozen Arctic soil, according to a new study in Nature Geoscience, and could double permafrost’s contributions to global climate warming compared to some previous model estimates that focused on gradual thaw alone. […]
The world’s oceans are getting hotter and acidifying under climate change at unprecedented rates, threatening coastal and high-mountain communities, marine ecosystems, and global fishing stocks, according to a new Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (SROCC) released this week by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel […]
Ecoss researchers show that more carbon is being released from thawed permafrost than previously thought. A new paper published this month in Nature Geoscience introduces a new way to track soil carbon in permafrost, which changes the understanding of how environmental change influences ecosystem carbon storage. The experiment builds on […]
The boreal forest is home to one-third of the Earth’s forest cover and stores 40 percent of the planet’s terrestrial carbon. North America’s boreal forest alone, which spans the northern portion of the continent from Alaska all the way to Newfoundland, covers an astounding 1.5 billion acres—more than 2.3 million […]
Findings of a new study organized by the Permafrost Carbon Network suggest that putting more effective greenhouse gas controls in place for the rest of this century could help mitigate the effects of climate change on the release of carbon from thawing soils of the northern permafrost region. Ecoss’ Research […]
Ecoss professor Ted Schuur is part of a select group of scientists charged with producing a landmark report examining the effects of climate change on oceans and the frozen world and what steps people must take to reduce those effects. In July, Schuur found out that he would be one […]
On a 10-meter-square plot of frozen soil in central Alaska, Ted Schuur is creating a window to the future. Schuur, an ecologist at Northern Arizona University (NAU) in Flagstaff, is intentionally warming this patch of permafrost to see how much of its carbon— now locked in frozen plant matter buried […]
Well known among the global scientific community for his research on the vast amounts of carbon stored in rapidly thawing permafrost soil – and its potential threat to the environment – Ted Schuur, professor of NAU’s Center for Ecosystem Science and Society, has spent nearly 20 years working to bring […]