Antarctica Is Practically Defined by Ice. What Happens When It Melts? For prepared observers, a single season of melting offers clues to the future of the southern continent. October 13, 2016—A single season of intense melting buffeted Antarctica in 2001-2002. It yielded changes that ranged from speeding up microbial food webs to shifting penguin populations…. Read more »
A historian travels back a century into the cold, windblown Antarctic, landing at the edge of McMurdo Sound. A group of explorers recently returned to the coast recount their trip into a series of “curious” dry valleys, where the pervasive snow and ice encountered elsewhere on the continent is almost entirely absent. Forced to abandon… Read more »
RFP Deadline: Wednesday, October 5, 2016 (1) This is the second RFP this year. How often will you have a call for proposals? From here forward, we plan to have an annual call for proposals. (2) Currently, we have an NSF grant funded for cross-site research. We would like to get the group together for… Read more »
To promote analysis and synthesis of LTER data, the NCO requests proposals for Synthesis Working Groups, with research to begin before May 2017. Funding is available for 2-4 projects of up to 2 years in duration. The Project Selection Committee is most interested in proposals anticipated to return high impact results in the five core… Read more »
— Woody Guthrie, Dust Bowl Blues Woody Guthrie, John Steinbeck, and Dorothea Lange all documented the devastation of the Dust Bowl in works that remain resonant with Americans nearly a century later. Via song, prose, and photograph, these artists revealed the devastation wind erosion can wreck on a landscape and the people who rely on… Read more »
Of the approximately 400 Gigatonnes of carbon released into the atmosphere over the past 200 years, only half has remained in the atmosphere. The other half has been absorbed by the earth’s natural carbon sinks— global oceans, soils, and plants— slowing the amount of climate change we might otherwise observe. While the earth currently acts as… Read more »
The United Nations estimates that 33% of global soils are moderately to severely degraded, and that given average rates of erosion, topsoil could be gone in 60 years. In response, the UN General Assembly declared 2015 the International Year of Soils. Their goal: to take a decidedly prosaic topic — soil health — and make… Read more »
Global population continues to grow: the United Nations expects an additional 2.5 billion people by 2050, all of whom will be absorbed into urban areas. When demographers add rural to urban migrants to that number, they project an additional 3.1 billion city dwellers by mid-century. As the concentration of humans in cities surges, a better… Read more »
What will the future feel like in our forests? In six plots at the Hubbard Brook Long Term Ecological Research Site in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the trees already know. Dr. Pamela Templer has created a robust simulation of the climate—warmer summer temperatures and later snowfall—that these forests will experience within the century…. Read more »
The IPCC projects that, even if humans succeed in keeping temperatures below the 2°C target set in Paris, sea level will rise 0.28 to 0.61 m this century. With this amount of sea level rise, salt water pulses from high tide floods and storm surges will become ever-more common in coastal ecosystems. Multiple LTER sites are running experiments… Read more »
