As emerging threats such as warming temperatures, pollution and other cumulative stressors put pressure on freshwater populations and contribute to global biodiversity crises, experts have sought to assess how effective environmental protections are at curbing this decline. 

Now, researchers have revealed that long-term improvements in water quality, as well as the increased occurrence of certain aquatic species, are likely associated with the implementation of broad environmental regulations such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.

“Rivers provide a lot of cultural, recreational and ecosystem services, and we also depend on fresh and clean water to survive,” said Casey Pennock, senior author of the study and an assistant professor in the aquatic ecology laboratory at The Ohio State University. “That’s really the motivation behind these conservation policies, to ensure that the natural environment is usable for both wildlife and all other things we care about.”

Aside from negatively impacting local biodiversity, contaminated water can destroy fishing industries and damage human health. It’s thanks to widespread environmental protections that water quality in the U.S. is better today than it was only a few decades ago, said Pennock. His team’s newfound evidence for this claim stems from water quality and aquatic species data collected between 1970 and 2023 across seven major river basins in Ohio. 

By using that data to analyze how fish, insects and freshwater mussel communities changed over time, the team’s findings showed that lower levels of pollutants in rivers — such as zinc, ammonia and lead — corresponded to increases in range for many aquatic species. These findings suggest the affected groups were those with heightened sensitivity to poor water quality.

Their observations indicated that as water quality improved, 71 fish species and 171 insect groups became more common across the state of Ohio, large river basins, with only a few species decreasing. Freshwater mussels, however, experienced mixed responses over time, with nine species increasing and 10 decreasing in occurrence. The composition of fish, aquatic insects and freshwater mussels also changed significantly over time in all seven river basins researchers studied.  

“Ecological communities are not static; they’re dynamic systems,” said Pennock. “Monitoring them is important to assessing how their trajectories change as new contaminants come online.” 

The study was recently published in the journal Ecological Indicators.

Despite how critical freshwater diversity is to the health of all of Earth’s ecosystems, it can be difficult for people to link the issue of conservation to the benefits they reap from it – such as protection from infectious diseases and a safe drinking water supply – in their everyday lives, said Lindsey Bruckerhoff, a co-author of the study and an assistant professor in the aquatic ecology laboratory at Ohio State.

“Our work revolves around trying to prevent further declines of imperiled species and keep diversity on the landscape,” she said. “So extensive research like this that highlights the positive effects of those systems on humans is incredibly rare.”

Additionally, as a lack of broad-scale monitoring efforts has made it difficult for researchers to document species-specific responses to prolonged environmental changes, this study, which compiles observations from numerous archives, is a vital addition to future conservation efforts.  

“We now have a dataset where we can actually analyze long-term biodiversity trends,” said Bruckerhoff. “It’s really exciting to be able to chart success in that way.”

According to the study, implementing nationwide policies also motivates municipalities to upgrade their own conservation initiatives. In response to the Clean Water Act, for example, Columbus instituted a $200 million municipal wastewater upgrade initiative for the Scioto River, leading to significant declines in levels of ammonia and heavy metals that continue to decrease today.

Overall, their results suggest that policies that promote conservation gains for animals like fish and insects and, by extension, protect human health, should remain in place, the researchers say. These outcomes also provide evidence of the benefits derived from environmental regulations. 

“This work shows there’s still more work to do,” said Pennock. “It tells us that if we deregulate or allow more pollution to happen, then those gains could reverse themselves, to our detriment.” 

This study was supported by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Ohio Biodiversity Conservation Partnership. Other Ohio State co-authors include Seth Drake and Nathaniel Shoobs, as well as Robert Miltner from the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.

Now, using a novel technique that enables researchers to directly analyze millions of individual particles at once, a new study has revealed that specks of dust trapped in Antarctic ice likely originated from a common source during the last Ice Age, between about 120,000 and 11,500 years ago. 

To determine this, a team led by Stanislav Kutuzov, lead author of the study and a researcher in earth sciences at The Ohio State University, examined more than 2 million particles from ice core samples taken from Taylor Glacier in coastal East Antarctica. The researchers found that major shifts in the number and concentration of dust grains that settled during this time period were likely linked to large-scale environmental shifts in Earth’s southern hemisphere. 

“This result implies that atmospheric circulation changed when we transitioned to a warmer period, and sources like Australia and New Zealand began to contribute to local dust deposition,” said Kutuzov.

Gaining a better understanding of these sources can offer clues into ancient climate systems, as well as improve  predictions about how those systems may behave in the future. 

Overall, the breadth of compositional data gathered in this work is consistent with results from past ice core investigations. However, this team’s more precise measurement method – identifying and analyzing thousands of distinct particles with a specific type of mass spectrometry – offers substantially more insight about the mineralogy of the dust particles, confirming that this new technique can act as a powerful tool for environmental nanoscience. 

“Normally, we are limited with analysis due to our sample volume,” said Kutuzov. “But the way this new technique works, it only requires a tiny amount of water to detect a huge amount of information about each particle.”

The study was recently published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Ice cores, precious scientific tools for studying Earth’s past environmental memories, are increasingly endangered as global temperatures rise. Before they are lost to glacier melt, scientists are racing to survey and preserve them from as many global areas as they can. 

Tropical glaciers such as the Quelccaya Ice Cap or Nevado Huascarán, for instance, have dust records that reflect regional signals, whereas dust found in more environmentally pristine areas such as Greenland and Antarctica tends to capture global changes to Earth’s atmosphere. 

What’s more, unlike traditional ice cores that are drilled vertically from the glacier’s surface down to bedrock, the Taylor Glacier ice core samples were collected horizontally, a method that can give researchers a more detailed look into a single specific time period. 

This ability allowed the team to observe that the type and amount of dust in the atmosphere changed during this period, as well as note an uptick of iron in the air, a critical nutrient associated with ocean bioactivity. 

“We went from a much colder, drier, dustier world to transitioning toward a more humid world leading up to the Holocene,” said Kutuzov. “We see a relative enrichment in iron oxide at this time and with so much soluble iron available, theories suggest these conditions could have supported a lot more life.”

Their analysis also identified the presence of thousands of volcanic particles in the ice core, likely as a result of occasional Victoria Land volcano eruptions nearly 14,800 years ago. Kutuzov said scientists could use these findings to develop a much-needed reference database for various minerals such as volcanic glass and dust from well-known source regions, especially as next-generation technologies inspire new ways to study ice cores. 

“Using this new method to confirm what was known before with more certainty shows that it could be applied to different places and events where we don’t know what happened,” he said. Other such places could even include other planets, as researchers prepare for future glacial explorations on those that also have water-ice, like Mars or Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons. 

“There’s so much excitement for these instruments that more and more researchers are applying them to look at their data from a completely different angle,” said Kutuzov. “There are still unknowns, but discoveries like this are what push science.”

Co-authors include John Olesik, Madeleine Lomax-Vogt and Lucas Carter from Ohio State; Gregory Lowry, Garret Bland, Jonas Wielinski and Ryan Sullivan from Carnegie Mellon University; and Paolo Gabrielli from the University of Turin in Italy. This study was supported by the U.S. Ice Drilling Program. 

Using satellite data from NASA’s GRACE missions, results show that these extensive glacier systems, often called the “water towers of Asia,” experienced significant losses in mass between 2002 and 2023. These findings reveal that if the extreme conditions that led to this decline continue, enhanced glacier melt could intensify short-term flood risks and substantially reduce long-term meltwater availability. The researchers say the findings underscore the need for reduced greenhouse gas emissions to stave off glacier melt and preserve a larger fraction of the region’s cryospheric water storage. 

Because communities in the area often rely on the glacier’s large meltwater stores for hydropower generation, renewable energy and large-scale irrigation systems, any changes in glacier size will have direct implications for local water security, agriculture and natural hazard management, said Jaydeo Dharpure, lead author of the study and a former postdoctoral research associate at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at The Ohio State University. 

“Decreasing glacial mass change can threaten infrastructure and increase the risk of loss of life,” he said. “While some ice losses and major disturbances are inevitable, glaciers play an important role for people living beside them, so learning to better monitor their evolutions is a must.”

The study was recently published in the journal Scientific Reports.

There are currently more than 95,000 glaciers located in High Mountain Asia, most of which are spread across about 15 sub-regions, or smaller ecological areas. 

To better grasp the extent of mass loss from these critical glaciers, researchers examined changes in Earth’s gravity field to determine how much frozen water was lost or added to the glaciers each year. Machine learning models were also used to address mission gaps in long-term glacier monitoring. In all, the team found that while water and ice loss steadily went up throughout the years, there was pronounced melt variability across certain subregions. 

Eastern Kunlun, for example, a mountain system that lies between the Tibetan Plateau and the Tarim Basin in western China, gained ice over the last few decades, but West Tien Shan, a mountain range that stretches in the opposite direction, did experience rapid mass losses. 

According to the study, the differences in outcomes for these subregions could have been caused by rising global temperatures, altered precipitation patterns, or even radiation emitted by the sun. But while challenging to study, because the glacier system in High Mountain Asia significantly influences global climate regulation, using new techniques to understand how the region reacts to these drivers as a whole is potentially one of the best ways future scientists can create more accurate global climate models, said Dharpure. 

“This is important work, because if these glaciers vanish in the future, downstream communities won’t just experience drinking or agricultural water shortages,” he said. 

Instead, melting glaciers would form new, uncharted lakes and rivers that continue to accumulate water, putting nearby communities in jeopardy, he said. “So scientists should be prepared to monitor how dangerous the many issues that disappearing glaciers cause will be for the billions of people they touch,” said Dharpure. 

Co-authors include Ohio State’s Ian Howat and Akansha Patel from Texas A&M University AgriLife. This work was supported by Ohio State’s Byrd Postdoctoral Fellowship. 

To unravel the cause behind this spike, researchers used nationwide forest data to examine how six environmental factors may have contributed to the increase in carbon sequestered by forests. They found that natural forces such as increasing temperatures, shifting precipitation, and carbon fertilization are among the largest contributors to carbon gains, but human drivers, like letting forests get older and planting trees, are also becoming bigger factors.

Since most decarbonization efforts focus on curbing active emissions, this new analysis aims to help researchers better separate what portion of carbon held by forests is related to human action and which portion isn’t, said Brent Sohngen, co-author of the study and a professor of environmental and resource economics at The Ohio State University.  

“Identifying and separating these influences hasn’t really been done before,” said Sohngen. “But with this data, the U.S. can be much more explicit about its carbon accounting, and that ability will provide a lot more information and long-term benefits for people who manage their forests and try to create carbon sinks.”

The study was published recently (Jan. 20, 2026) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Forests act as vital tools to slow warming of the planet, as the more carbon that trees sequester, the less there is in the atmosphere. Large areas such as the Amazon Rainforest and the Congo Basin are known as “passive” carbon sinks because they absorb more carbon than they release without the need for human intervention. 

In temperate regions, forests like Ohio’s Wayne National Forest are more likely to become carbon sources because they require extensive active inputs, such as tree-planting or other forest management activities to remain a strong sink, said Sohngen.

“The forests that we aren’t managing are doing exactly what we want them to do, which is to be ecosystem buffers,” he said. “That’s a good thing, but as we hit global carbon thresholds, the strength and size of that sink is slowing down in all these forests.”

The study looked at six drivers – temperature, precipitation, carbon dioxide, management, age composition and area – and the team was surprised by exactly how much natural factors influenced the total amount of carbon stored by U.S. forests. For instance, changes in temperature and precipitation from 2005 to 2022 led to an increase of 66 million metric tons of carbon sequestration per year. 

During the same period, human intervention had both negative and positive effects, as human-caused deforestation reduced stored forest carbon by about 31 million tons per year, while activities like tree-planting and reforestation added about 23 million tons per year. Yet it was forest age — mostly structural changes in the peak growth stages of local trees — that helped lock in the most carbon, by 89 million metric tons per year.

Overall, these results suggest that while climate policies are doing their part to mitigate current climate challenges, scientists should also recognize the extent to which natural processes continue to shape our world. 

This work also highlights the vast difference in the amount of carbon forests can absorb naturally versus when they are actively managed. If used in tandem with other environmental analyses, these findings may help other countries better plan how to utilize their national forest inventories to meet future net-zero requirements, said Sohngen. 

Going forward, researchers may seek to localize their observations further, as having more detailed state or county carbon forestry data could help inform conservationists and wildlife managers on how to optimize the well-being of their land on a local rather than regional level.

“We have to think about how we start to address the impacts of climate change in parts of the country where there’s a slowdown of forest growth, and figure out how to adapt a region’s forests  to the best climate future possible,” said Sohngen.  

Co-authors include Eric C. Davis from the United States Department of Agriculture-Economic Research Service, and David J. Lewis from Oregon State University. The research was supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Economic Research Service. 

The resulting evolutionary arms race between bacteria modifying themselves and viruses fighting back raises questions: What does it cost a cell to resist infections, and how does that alter how ecosystems function? 

In a new study, researchers have explored the mechanisms of phage resistance and its effects on the ecological jobs done by ocean bacteria. The team found that some of the mutations studied don’t interfere with – and may even enhance – the bacteria’s ability to carry out their job of capturing and sinking carbon to the ocean floor, thanks to giving the cells a “sticky” quality. 

The study also revealed two kinds of mutations: the more standard surface mutations that don’t let phages in at all, and another type of metabolic mutations found inside the bacteria. These are much less studied, and would indicate a virus could enter the cell but couldn’t successfully make more viruses. 

“We found that both metabolic and surface mutations caused the bacteria to get stickier, but only in surface mutants did those changes cause the cells to sink much more readily. That was very, very obvious,” said Marion Urvoy, co-first author of the study and a postdoctoral research associate in microbiology at The Ohio State University. 

“And that’s kind of cool when you think about it, because carbon export in the ocean is important. From past papers, we know that virus abundance is the best predictor of carbon export, more so than any other organism, but we don’t know all the mechanisms behind this. It’s possible that the selection of surface mutants through infection, which promotes the sinking of bacteria, is one explanation.” 

The research was published recently in Nature Microbiology. 

The study focused on 13 phage-resistant mutants evolved from Cellulophaga baltica bacteria against two types of phages, representing ecologically relevant model systems. 

After infecting the bacteria with these phages and isolating the phage-resistant mutated cells, researchers ran experiments and created computational models to see how the mutants behaved. Results showed the classic surface mutations that blocked phage entry were completely resistant to several phages, but the internal metabolic mutations provided specific resistance to only one phage at a time. 

The team was able to tease out the effects of one of the two intracellular changes they observed. This mutation altered the process behind the production of a single amino acid that helps in synthesizing several lipids – fatty molecules inside the cell that store energy, form membranes and send signals, among other functions. 

“The mutation impacted the pool of lipids, which prevented phage replication,” Urvoy said. “Our working theory is that because the phage needs these lipids to assemble new virus particles, it is not able to assemble at the end of the replication cycle because one of the key parts is missing.” 

Turning to the ecological aspects of phage resistance mutations, the study showed mutations came with a cost to the bacteria and, potentially, to the microbial community. 

“We showed for all of these mutations, whether they affect the cell surface or its metabolism, there’s a cost in terms of growth rates. That is to say the cells are growing slower, and if you affect the growth rate of an organism, you’re bound to affect other members of the community,” Urvoy said. “We found this decreasing growth was more pronounced for the surface mutants – so they’re more resistant to more phages, but it comes at the cost of growing slower in general.” 

But the stickiness and sinking activity of surface mutants stood out as a critical finding when it comes to the marine biological pump that helps sink carbon to the deep sea. 

The finding builds upon earlier work led by co-first author Cristina Howard-Varona, a research scientist in microbiology at Ohio State, showing that cyanobacteria that perform photosynthesis in the ocean, when simultaneously infected by phages and stressed by nearby hungry predator microbes, might take in more carbon. 

Howard-Varona plans to pursue further study of the mechanisms underlying metabolic mutations against phages. 

“This really opens the gate to wanting to examine more intracellular resistance because it’s so understudied,” she said. “If we add more types of phages, do you get more mutations and more types of mechanisms that we don’t know about? This is really just the tip of the iceberg.” 

Urvoy and Howard-Varona work in the lab of senior study author Matthew Sullivan, professor of microbiology and civil, environmental and geodetic engineering and director of the Center of Microbiome Science at Ohio State, whose research program focuses on how viruses impact microbiomes in complex ocean, soil and human systems, including pioneering many experimental and bioinformatic approaches to “see” these impacts. Within that context, his lab is investigating how carbon cycling works in the oceans and the role viruses play. 

“It’s important to understand what happens in the ocean because it affects climate globally. For microorganisms, we need to understand their impacts on carbon because they dictate whether carbon sinks or gets released into the atmosphere, and that outcome impacts our lives,” said Urvoy, who was recruited to Ohio State as a President’s Postdoctoral Scholar. “Our work and other work is now showing that viruses, as a component of the marine microbiome, also play roles, perhaps quite centrally, and we need to understand how they affect bacteria and how that fits into the whole picture.” 

This work was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy and the Swedish Research Council. 

Additional co-authors are Carlos Osusu-Ansah, Marie Burris, Natalie Solonenko and Karna Gowda of Ohio State; Andrew Stai and Robert Hettich of Oak Ridge National Laboratory; John Bouranis and Malak Tfaily of the University of Arizona; and Karin Holmfeldt of Linnaeus University in Sweden.

While only 10% of Earth is covered in glacial ice, these masses have far-reaching impacts on all the world’s ecosystems. Rapid melting can trigger natural disasters, and glaciers help to regulate the planet’s temperature and sea level and are sources of pristine fresh drinking water.

To better differentiate between seasonal ice loss and that caused by long-term climate trends, researchers studied the fluctuating heights of three glaciers: the La Perouse Glacier in North America, the Viedma Glacier in South America and the Skamri Glacier located in Central Asia.

Their analysis revealed that between 2019 and 2023, the Viedma Glacier (Argentina) and the La Perouse Glacier (Alaska) experienced consistent thinning, but the Skamri Glacier (Pakistan)  had been stable enough to experience a small net gain of ice, said Rongjun Qin, co-author of the study and an associate professor of civil, environmental and geodetic engineering at The Ohio State University.

Measurements in this study were made using daily high-resolution images gathered by the PlanetScope satellite constellation, which researchers then used to create 3D reconstructions of how glacial ice flows evolved over time. By incorporating local and global climate data into these models to explore seasonal variations of glacier melt, the team essentially designed a way to monitor the behavior of glaciers across diverse regions.

“This is something that we’ve been thinking about for a long time, because existing glacier studies have such sparse seasonal observations since it’s difficult to get data out of remote areas,” said Qin, who is also a core faculty member of Ohio State’s Translational Data Analytics Institute. “What we wanted to do is to use medium-to-high resolution data to broaden those capabilities and improve the accuracy of the 3D models generated from that data.”

The study was recently published in the journal GIScience & Remote Sensing.

According to the study, while many modern 2D tracking techniques can provide valuable insights into glacier flow, previous studies tend to capture only short-term snapshots or else offer observations without in-depth motion analysis or high-resolution 3D data. This team’s work may help scientists keep better track of seasonal climate issues like glacier melt and expand long-term observations of these masses, and their 3D model method also reveals new data about how quickly the glaciers react to changes in the weather.

The Viedma and Skamri Glaciers, for example, exhibit a 45-day lag time in response to changes in local climate conditions like rain or snow. The La Perouse Glacier, however, was shown to react to changes almost immediately, meaning that its flow can very quickly become faster or slower based on how much precipitation it has accumulated.

In another finding, researchers concluded that behavior differences in all three are driven by distinct environmental and climatic conditions, but suggest that both local and global factors, rather than any single one, are responsible for patterns in glacier motion dynamics worldwide.

Such observations are vital to deepening our global understanding of glacier science, and with further improvements, this study’s algorithm could also be a useful tool for future disaster prediction and management, said Qin. Already, scientists have used similar systems to warn communities of natural disasters that would have led to tragedy.

In all, researchers hope that supporting modeling works like this one will inspire more scientists to utilize satellite data to investigate other types of important environmental research questions.

“Hopefully we can build on all sorts of applications that people are interested in with this,” said Qin.

Shengxi Gui of Ohio State was a co-author. This work’s data was provided by PlanetScope.

Researchers examined soil core samples taken from two constructed freshwater wetlands and compared them to data from previous studies of the same wetlands over 29 years to determine how well human-made wetlands sequester — or capture and store — carbon as they age. 

Findings showed both wetlands captured similar amounts of carbon over the decades, but neither has shown a net gain or loss since year 15.

But their value in sequestering carbon is remarkable, the researchers said.

“Wetlands are generally thought of as the kidneys of our world because they can clean water naturally and sequester carbon well,” said Jay Martin, a distinguished professor in food, agricultural and biological engineering at The Ohio State University and a co-author of the study. “As we try to combat climate change, they also provide habitat for many species that are important to us.”

The researchers analyzed data from the Schiermeier Olentangy River Wetland Research Park (ORWRP), a site ideal for long-term study due to the overwhelming amount of environmental data it generated over the past three decades.

Previous studies of the park revealed that its soil has shown an increase in carbon levels. But by using detailed measurements taken in the wetland’s 29th year post-construction, Martin’s team found that wetlands’ ability to sequester carbon diminishes as they mature. 

The study was recently published in the journal Ecological Engineering. 

Under current conditions, the wetlands have become a stable ecological force, and this equilibrium isn’t expected to change anytime soon. 

“When you first construct a wetland, the initial plant growth is often what causes carbon to be sequestered so quickly,” said Daniel Ruane, a former master’s student in ecological engineering and the lead author of the study. “But it just isn’t possible to have infinite growth.” 

Although there are limits to how much atmospheric carbon artificial wetlands can effectively store, since their carbon sequestration and storage rates are still far greater than other ecosystems, they still represent a potential solution to counter climate change, said Ruane. 

As a result, future research into the health of the ORWRP is likely to analyze the various plant communities that grow within the area as well as investigate methane emission levels to determine how long the land can function as a carbon sink. 

“The benefits that wetlands provide are increasingly positive,” said Martin. “Our findings emphasize that these ecosystems should be looked at in a better light now than ever before.”

Due to an increase in urban and agricultural land use, more than 50% of Earth’s natural wetlands have disappeared over the last few centuries. This decline has impacted ecosystem services all around the U.S., but most notably in the Midwest, said Martin. 

In Ohio, for example, projected wetland loss is closer to 90%, jeopardizing many essential processes that humans rely on, like water quality improvement and flood mitigation. 

This provides even more reason why policymakers should be trying to build and maintain wetland ecosystems, Ruane said.

“If we started to create and restore more wetlands now, that could solve a lot of our problems down the road,” he said. 

Co-authors of the study include Michael Brooker and William Mitsch of Ohio State, Blanca Bernal of Greencollar US Inc., Chris Anderson of Auburn University, and Robert Nairn of the University of Oklahoma.

Their findings revealed that due to frequent disturbances like wildfires that raze down vegetation and persistent drought and deforestation that starve both the land and wildlife, the resilience of many plant communities in southern boreal forests — or their ability to recover after these events — significantly decreased over time. This may affect the Arctic carbon budget, foreshadowing a future where the region is likely to become a carbon source instead of remaining a carbon sink due to its limited capacity to absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide in the coming decades.  

This is because Arctic and boreal regions have warmed several times faster than other places around the globe and further warming is expected in the near future, said Yue Zhang, lead author of the study and a graduate student in earth sciences at The Ohio State University.

“When we talk about the response of forests to climate change, most of the time we’re thinking about the tropical rainforest,” said Zhang. “But remote boreal forests are really important in terms of their vast extent, large carbon storage and potential to mitigate climate change.”

The study was recently published in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

To better understand how the region’s ecosystem changed because of increased warming, researchers used historical data from NASA’s Arctic-Boreal Vulnerability Experiment (ABoVE) program to remotely sense subtle changes in greenness in Alaska and western Canada between 2000 and 2019. They were able to estimate the time-varying speed of vegetation recovery from small fluctuations or large losses, even in areas where large losses have not happened yet. 

The study found that while plant resilience in the southern boreal forests notably decreased, even in regions with greening trends, resilience was thought to have increased in most of the Arctic tundra. Besides fires, other factors like heat and drought could have contributed to declines in plant resilience in the south, and changes in nutrient availability could have helped vegetation thrive in the rest of the Arctic.

While the release of food may benefit plant growth and resilience, the reality is that the rising temperatures that make this possible could also cause Arctic permafrost to melt more quickly than it already is, releasing from the ground as much carbon as 35 million cars emit in a year and hastening the arrival of climate tipping points.

It is uncertain now how much of the carbon will be absorbed by plants and how much will contribute to further warming, said Zhang. 

“That’s pretty concerning, because while greening may indicate that productivity and carbon uptake in these regions is increasing now, resilience decline indicates that it may not be sustainable in the longer term,” she said. 

According to the study, these shifts are indications that the entire ecosystem is in danger, as a large fraction of southern boreal forests is losing its stability, potentially leading to widespread forest loss and biome shifts.

Greening regions that experience resilience decline at the same time might also signal that the region is struggling to take a few last deep breaths before significant forest loss, said Yanlan Liu, senior author of the study and an assistant professor of earth sciences at Ohio State. This means that while the region could absorb significant amounts of carbon in the short term, scientists expect that if resilience continues to decline, the Arctic boreal ecosystem may not be as effective in mitigating climate in the long term as previously thought.

“Temperature records show this region is warming up to two to four times faster than the global average,” said Liu. “This is a hot spot of vegetation change where studying it can tell us about the ecosystem stability and what it’s capable of tolerating before it transitions into an alternative state through pervasive forest loss.”

The study further revealed that warm and dry areas with high elevation and dense vegetation cover were among the hotspots of resilience decline. Yet because many climate models currently lack consensus on how vegetation change and carbon dynamics contribute to the other, this team’s work will help enhance such models by informing scientists of where vegetation changes are likely to occur.

Ultimately, said Zhang, their method revealed more nuanced changes in the health of the region’s vegetation, beyond previously reported greening and browning trends. This method also provides researchers a tool to identify potential vegetation loss in other regions in the coming decades. 

With plans to continue trying to accurately predict ecosystem changes, researchers note their results warrant more field investigations aimed at better characterizing and understanding the resilience of the region. 

“Scientists need to learn to quantify climate-induced risks through diverse lenses,” said Liu. “On top of satellite remote sensing, we need more ground observations to help us identify ways to leverage these findings to inform future resources and risk management strategies.”

The study was supported by NASA and the Ohio Supercomputer Center. Co-authors include Kaiguang Zhao from Ohio State, Jonathan Wang from the University of Utah, and Logan T. Berner and Scott J. Goetz from Northern Arizona University. 

Despite feeling like a stationary mass, most solid ground is undergoing a process of deformation, sinking and rising in response to many environmental factors. In Antarctica, melting glacial ice means less weight on the bedrock below, allowing it to rise. How the rising earth interacts with the overlying ice sheet to affect sea level rise is not well-studied, said Terry Wilson, co-author of the study and a senior research scientist at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at The Ohio State University. 

In the new study, Wilson’s colleagues at McGill University developed a model to predict how these interactions could impact global sea level, finding that if humans can lower greenhouse gas emissions and global warming is slowed, upward shifts in the solid earth could reduce Antarctica’s contribution to sea level rise by about 40%, significantly bolstering the best case scenarios for global sea level rise. In this low-emissions scenario, land uplift slows the flow of ice from land to ocean, allowing for more of the ice sheet to be preserved. 

Conversely, if humans are unable to lower carbon emissions in time, ice retreat will outpace uplift, pushing ocean water away from Antarctica and amplifying sea level rise. These events could significantly worsen the most dire models of projected sea level rise along populated coastlines, said Wilson. 

“Our measurements show that the solid earth that forms the base of the Antarctic ice sheet is changing shape surprisingly quickly,“ said Wilson. “The land uplift from reduced ice on the surface is happening in decades, rather than over thousands of years.” 

The study was published today in Science Advances. 

To arrive at these conclusions, the team developed a 3D model of the Earth’s interior using geophysical field measurements from the Antarctic Network (ANET) of the Polar Earth Observing Network (POLENET) project. The mission is focused on studying the changing polar regions by collecting GPS and seismic data from an array of autonomous systems across Antarctica.

Researchers then performed a number of simulations to capture many possible evolutions of Antarctica’s ice sheet and the extent of global sea level rise Earth may experience until the year 2500, according to those parameters.  

 “We can project what difference it actually will make if we all contribute to a low-emission scenario now, versus what’s come to be called ‘business as usual’ emissions,” said Wilson, who is also the lead investigator of the ANET-POLENET project. 

She attributes the model’s unprecedented level of detail to how deftly it incorporates data from Antarctica. GPS stations monitor how the land is moving and seismometers measure how fast seismic waves from earthquakes travel through the earth, yielding important insight into where the land uplift will be fast or slow. 

Surprisingly, according to some of the team’s GPS observations processed by researchers at Ohio State, Wilson said, the Antarctic Ice Sheet is currently experiencing a solid earth uplift of about 5 centimeters per year, about 5 times the rate that North America experiences.  

Another significant aspect of the study is how the changes in Antarctica under different carbon emissions scenarios will impact coastlines around the world. Because sea level change will not be uniform, the study notes that nearly 700 million people around the world living in coastal regions will be most impacted by rising seas due to Antarctic ice loss.

Since some regions, such as small island nations, will be more vulnerable than others, mitigating environmental conditions like atmospheric and ocean warming is a vital issue for society, said Wilson. 

“Many people are now more aware they’re experiencing the effects of climate change,” she said. “This work reinforces that our actions as individuals, nations and globally can make a difference in what kind of Earth our offspring will experience in their lifetimes.”

The study results highlight how complex the relationship between the solid earth and the processes that happen atop it is, as well as the importance of continuing to gather enough data to make prompt and accurate predictions about what the next few centuries of our planet will look like. 

“There’s a lot of uncertainty in every model and every prediction that you make,” said Wilson. “But to document how fast our world is changing, it’s very important to continue advancing our ability to make predictions that are more certain, which is the only path that will allow us to tend to our future in a meaningful way.”

Wilson completed the study with colleagues from McGill University, Pennsylvania State University, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Columbia University, Washington University, Colorado State University and the Union of Concerned Scientists. This study was supported by the U.S National Science Foundation and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. 

Thompson, a distinguished university professor of earth sciences at The Ohio State University and senior research scientist at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center, has spent his five-decade career on expeditions to some of the highest and most remote places imaginable, drilling ice cores to illuminate ancient histories that only glaciers hold.  

It’s for this reason that “Canary,” a new documentary opening in limited release tomorrow (Sept. 15, 2023), calls Thompson “the closest living thing to Indiana Jones.” Set against the backdrop of the Peruvian Andes’ now-melting Quelccaya Ice Cap, the film follows the highs and lows of Thompson’s race to save these vital ice masses around the world from global warming.  

“I’ve been working in Quelccaya for 50 years and I have never seen it in such bad shape,” he said. “It’s heartbreaking to see such a magnificent ice cap fall apart, but this is true throughout the Himalayas, on Kilimanjaro in Africa, and Greenland – if there’s ice in today’s world, it’s melting.”

The nearly two-hour film holds a second layer of personal significance to Thompson, who grew up believing he’d be destined to spend his life toiling in West Virginia’s coal mines. It was named “Canary” from the way miners used to carry canaries down into the mining tunnels because they were sensitive enough to detect carbon monoxide or other toxic gas changes in the air. If the canary fell unconscious or died, the miners would be cautioned enough to retreat before tragedy could strike. 

Now, just as songbirds once sounded the alarm to impending disaster in mines, so too can the well-being of glaciers warn us of a future climate catastrophe, said Thompson.

“Glaciers are our canary in the coal mine,” he said. “They are an early warning system for the Earth and they’re all retreating at an accelerating rate.”

Opening up in New Guinea, the film crew follows Thompson’s team on a number of perilous research missions throughout the years as researchers drill ice cores from mountains once thought to be too high for humans to ever conquer. “Everybody has mountains, and those mountains are different. But overcoming those mountains takes the same type of persistence and dedication and hard work,” said Thompson. 

Once ice cores are collected, these specimens are whisked away to the Byrd Center’s freezers for cold storage, where thousands of meters of ice samples are stored and preserved so scientists can study what the chemistry, gases, dust, viruses and bacteria that lie within them can reveal about Earth’s complex environmental past. Though the documentary emphasizes that the rapid disappearance of glaciers is inevitable – likely within the 21st century – having The Byrd Center’s vast collection can go a long way to informing climate research for years after humanity loses the glaciers, said Thompson. 

“Preserving that archive is one of our chief missions for the next generation because those will be the only samples that we have,” he said. “We’re measuring things that we couldn’t do a decade ago, and I can only think about what we might be able to measure in 20 years that we wouldn’t be able to without these records.” 

Intertwined with describing the challenges of standing on the frontlines of climate change is the film’s account of how Thompson’s relationship with his work changed after he was diagnosed with congestive heart failure. 

“I was, at one stage, given less a than 10% chance of survival, but I did survive,” he said. “It gave me a new perspective on how fleeting life can be and a better feel for how difficult the climate issue is when you’re dealing with people’s lives.”

As for the legacy he’ll one day leave behind, Thompson said getting the story right on the silver screen will touch far more hearts than would have been possible before, because he believes that climate change won’t be solved just by writing scientific papers or from inside a lab, but by remarkable people who will use the research to  change our trajectory. 

“Humans didn’t leave the Stone Age because we ran out of stones. We found a better way,” said Thompson. “And we will not leave the fossil fuel age when we use all the fossil fuels, but because we’re going to find better ways to utilize the other technologies we have.”

The Gateway Film Center will host premieres of Canary at 1:30 p.m. on Friday, Sept. 15, and 7 p.m. on Sunday, Sept. 17. These showings will include an introduction and post-screening Q&A with Thompson and Ellen Mosely-Thompson, a distinguished university professor in geography at Ohio State. Additional screenings will be held throughout the week. The film will then have a one-night-only special nationwide screening on Sept. 20.

Researchers at The Ohio State University developed impacts-based thresholds for drought in Ohio, looking specifically at how corn yield and streamflow were affected by various drought indicators, such as notable changes in soil moisture, crops, and even livestock losses in the state.

The results suggest this impacts-based approach could give Ohio farmers earlier and more accurate notice when drought conditions are approaching, said Steven Quiring, co-author of the study and a professor of geography at Ohio State.

“We want to better understand what steps should be taken so that Ohio can better prepare for and also monitor the onset of drought conditions because a lot of the best ways to respond to drought is taking action early,” said Quiring. Moreover, with a more precise early warning system, agriculture producers might be able to save time and money by implementing water restrictions, or by switching to different or more drought-resistant crops.

The study was published in the Journal of Hydrometeorology. 

The Ohio State researchers compared how their method performed at predicting droughts with data from the U.S Drought Monitor (USDM). 

The problem with the USDM is that it uses fixed drought thresholds, or guidelines that use the same parameters to measure changes in all seasons and climate regions of the country. Unfortunately, this one-size-fits-all approach can cause monitoring plans to inaccurately gauge local weather conditions and how they impact those in certain communities, Quiring said.

By analyzing data from four drought indices commonly used in previous studies to monitor drought intensity across the United States, researchers were able to show that fixed thresholds tend to indicate milder drought conditions in Ohio than are indicated by the impacts-based thresholds identified in their study. 

It’s why Quiring and his team want to use the impacts-based method to revamp those thresholds to better reflect drought conditions in Ohio, a move that starts by updating The Ohio Emergency Management Agency’s state drought plan. 

To accomplish their goal, the researchers investigated how data from the four indices impacted streamflow, or how much water discharges over a designated point in a fixed period of time, and Ohio’s total corn yield, mainly because the crop covers an extensive area within the state, and nearly every county grows it. 

Identifying agricultural drought thresholds that are specific to Ohio is important, said Quiring. Because the impacts of drought can vary from region to region, using the same drought thresholds in California as in Ohio is absurd, he said. Additionally, the types of drought that occur can differ. Ohio, for example, in particular is prone to “flash droughts” — shortages caused by warm weather that can happen quickly over a few days or weeks. 

“These rapid-onset droughts can be particularly challenging for the agricultural community because they arrive quickly and conditions can rapidly go from normal to drier than normal,” said Quiring. “All of a sudden soil moisture is depleted, the crops are stressed and yield losses and impacts on the ecosystem occur.”  

The last time severe drought caused major losses in the United States was in 2012 when a record-breaking heat wave resulted in $34.2 billion in economic losses, 123 direct deaths and a 26% decrease in total corn crop yield across the country. 

As large areas of the country dried out, Ohio’s corn yield dropped from about 160 bushels per acre to 120 bushels per acre within a year. While such considerable losses have not happened since, according to the State Climate Office of Ohio, some areas of the state have experienced abnormally dry drought conditions this year.  

What’s more, the researchers’ impacts-based method of drought monitoring also takes into account how climate change can worsen flash drought events.

“One of the impacts that we found to be counterintuitive in Ohio is that with climate change, we do expect more rainfall overall, but we also expect to see more droughts because there are longer periods of time where no rain occurs,” said Quiring. 

The results of this study suggest that following guidelines that aren’t specific to a region’s issues can end up either systematically underestimating the impacts of severe drought conditions in some locations or overestimating them in others, Quiring said. 

While it’ll be some time before Quiring’s team can get their research incorporated into the next edition of the state drought plan, the study emphasizes that its methods could easily be applied to other regions beyond Ohio where long-term streamflow and crop yield data are readily available. Optimistically, it could help to improve drought monitoring worldwide and provide useful information to future agriculture producers and decision-makers, said Quiring. 

“This work is actually timely because it will provide a basis for decision-making in Ohio, rather than using research that’s been done in other parts of the country,” said Quiring. “Hopefully we can give better guidance to those who are making decisions on the ground.”

This study was supported by the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS). Co-authors were Ning Zhang and Zhiying Li, who were both at Ohio State when the study was conducted. Zhang is now at the University of California, Davis and Li is at Indiana University.  

One of the 10 most forest-rich countries in the world, about 80.9 million hectares of trees cover India — about 25% of the nation — but this is a significant decline from years past. Between the 1890s and the 1990s, a combination of rapid economic development and overexploitation of local resources led to India losing nearly 80% of its native forest area. Now, as India’s forests still continue to disappear, researchers are focused on helping preserve what remains.  

“Our work was done in an effort to help India’s government and industries improve the country’s attempts at forest sustainability,” said Ying Zuo, lead author of the project and a graduate student in earth sciences at The Ohio State University. 

The land use monitoring system was trained using data provided by Norway’s International Climate and Forests Initiative (NICFI), an enterprise of the Norwegian government that aims to reduce the destruction of tropical forests, in part by providing high-resolution images of the world’s tropics. The product is generated using images from PlanetScope, a constellation of satellites that takes daily images of the entire globe.  

By combining the NICFI products' data with a global land cover map produced by Tsinghua University, their deep learning model was able to acquire a more detailed type of base map of the area.  

In an effort to combine two datasets into the same system, we resampled them into the same spatial resolution and aligned each pixel to create an image-labeled paired training dataset,” said Zuo. “The process helps us to assimilate the two datasets so they can be used to train our deep learning model.” This essentially merges thousands of small pictures into one larger base map. 

After training their deep learning model on these new satellite images, the team was able to process 10 base maps of the area, ranging from January to October 2022.  

The research poster was presented last week at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union. During her presentation, Zuo said that using these maps, the team was able to detect seasonal shifts across India, such as changes to barren land, how crop land was affected by monsoons during the rainy season, and the distribution of forests in mountainous regions.  

One conclusion from the study was that it is vital for ecologists to more closely study the seasonal impact of monsoons on India’s forest cover. Understanding these seasonal changes can help scientists understand the effects of climate change on forests.  

“As the average temperature of our Earth increases, natural hazards will become a lot more frequent, so having these maps at our disposal benefits everyone’s understanding of how this problem affects life on Earth,” she said. 

Additionally, if the team can expand the timespan of these base maps over several years instead of several months, Zuo said better results could help scientists study other annual changes around the globe, such as floods.  

“The characteristics of local forests and their surrounding habitats might likely be different in other regions,” said Zuo. “But with the help of more detailed datasets, our work could easily be used in areas of the world where detecting and alerting the public to forest degradation and its side effects need to become a priority.” 

Co-authors of the poster include C.K Shum, Rongjun Qin, Yuanyuan Jia, Guixiang Zhang and Shengxi Gui, all researchers at Ohio State. This work was supported by the USAID Forest Sustainability Project. 

The latest report by the U.N Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released earlier this week, summarizes new findings on climate change and outlines possible solutions. Brent Sohngen, professor of environmental and resource economics at The Ohio State University, was lead author of the report’s section on agriculture, which spanned about 130 pages of the 3,000 page document.

Sohngen’s portion covers how agriculture, forests and related land use can contribute to both climate change and climate mitigation, or the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. 

“The key message is that there are a lot of actions in the agricultural land-use sectors that people around the world can undertake to mitigate climate change,” said Sohngen, who has worked with the IPCC since the late 1990s.

Although most greenhouse gas emissions come from energy production, agriculture and changes in land use account for about 22% of all carbon dioxide emissions. If these numbers could be reduced, either by curbing deforestation or turning to alternative biofuels, between 9 and 11 billion tons of carbon dioxide per year could be mitigated, said Sohngen.

The report also warns that if both governments and individuals don’t begin to take climate warnings seriously, global warming could soon become twice as catastrophic as it is now. While many nations have previously promised to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, it’ll take real change, not political promises, to ensure humanity doesn’t waste its last chance, the report said. 

In order to produce the report, researchers from more than 165 countries reviewed over 18,000 scientific papers on topics ranging from restructuring fossil fuel use to policy recommendations on promoting international cooperation.  

The report also delivered some good news.

Greenhouse gas emissions were at their highest between 2010 to 2019, but since then, that rate has slowed considerably. Due to the pandemic, CO₂ emissions also dropped temporarily in 2020, before creeping back up in the second half of the year. 

Even better, according to the report, the key technologies and policies needed to keep global warming from reaching new heights already exist. For example, solar and wind power are some of the best ways we have to combat climate change. 

“Now there are more options and more ways for people to get involved in mitigating climate change that are within the realm of being cost effective,” Sohngen said. “Part of the reason why people are more optimistic about this report is because we’ve actually made progress on reducing emissions through mitigation actions.”

The only problem is figuring out how to better implement them, Sohngen said. One of the biggest hurdles humanity will have to overcome boils down to funding. 

“The scientific literature suggests that if we do want to stay under the 1.5 degree target, we have to really scale up financing,” Sohngen said. “We’ve estimated that about $50 to $250 billion per year over the next decade is needed to achieve some of the goals in the land-use sector for mitigation.”

It’s at this intersection, between land use and people, that the report indicates a “strong link between sustainable development, vulnerability and climate risks.” 

That means that ramping up efforts to create sustainable development, and erasing extreme poverty, could be a huge factor in controlling and monitoring Earth’s overall health. 

Sohngen said that he’s optimistic about how the public will respond to the report.  

“There’s undoubtedly some approaches to climate change that we’re not thinking about now that hopefully, the next generation of scientists will think about in the future,” Sohngen said. “I think that this report is an opportunity for people to study and to develop new methods, and better solutions to the climate crisis.”