Environment

Arctic Ice June 2011

Arctic Ice June 2011 The sun is the main driver of climate and weather.  The Arctic solar year could be plotted as a graph of the angle of the sun relative to the horizon,  negative in winter and positive in summer.  The graph would be a very neat wavefor ...

Article - Patrick Lockerby - Jun 18 2011 - 8:37pm

Defining Dallas: Trinity River Audubon Center after dark

One of the most engaging things about a landscape is how it changes after dark.  I haven't been at TRAC very often after sundown, but last night I was in an Amphibian Watch training program and to count frogs, you have to wait until the sun goes down. ...

Blog Post - Mel. White - Jun 18 2011 - 9:00pm

Death In The Snow

Climate change is very complex, and, consequentially, models predicting it need to take into account many different aspects, from wind patterns to plant and algal growth. One of the expected consequences of the changing climate is that some regions will b ...

Article - Gunnar De Winter - Jun 20 2011 - 9:09am

Defining Dallas: Camp Wisdom Scout Camp Bug Hunt

Monday brought a delightful and unanticipated opportunity-- a chance to do a little citizen science at Camp Wisdom Boy Scout Camp (http://camp-wisdom-bsa.org/).  This week's activities were designed for the younger scouts, and on the spur of the momen ...

Blog Post - Mel. White - Jun 21 2011 - 9:57pm

Defining Dallas: Struggles of a Pond

Ponds are interesting things because their boundaries are always changing.  On a very small scale there's a lot of drama, such as the snakes fishing for Mosquito fish (gambusia) trapped in a drying puddle.  On a larger scale, what happens in the loca ...

Blog Post - Mel. White - Jun 27 2011 - 8:40pm

Plastic Found In 9 Percent Of 'Garbage Patch' Fish

An article in  Marine Ecology Progress Series found evidence of plastic waste in more than nine percent of the stomachs of fish collected during a recent voyage by  graduate students from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego to the North Pac ...

Article - News Staff - Jun 30 2011 - 6:22pm

Who Trusts In Government? People With A Lot To Lose

If you pay a lot of taxes and get little to show for it, you don't have much trust in government, but if you are in a disaster-prone area, you have more confidence in government than most, say researchers in  the International Journal of Wildland Fire ...

Article - News Staff - Jul 1 2011 - 9:36am

Superfund Me

Scattered across Santa Clara County — home during our tenure at Stanford — are 23 parcels of land so polluted that they’ve been targeted for government intervention. These “Superfund sites,”numbering more than 1,250 across the United States and its territo ...

Article - Holly Moeller - Jul 3 2011 - 8:21pm

Into The Matrix: Conservation Beyond The Borders Of Reserves

Last week, the United Nations added 18 sites around the globe to its list of biosphere reserves, bringing the total number of sites so designated under its Man and the Biosphere Program to 581. Most of us are probably more familiar with another U.N. collec ...

Article - Holly Moeller - Jul 7 2011 - 5:57pm

Goodbye Tuna?

Recently, all species of scombrids and billfish have been assessed by the IUCN to determine their ranking on the Red List of Threatened Species. And for tuna specifically, the results weren't good at all. Five of eight species aren't doing well. ...

Article - Gunnar De Winter - Jul 13 2011 - 7:00am