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. 

Trees are the planet’s living lungs; they remove carbon from the atmosphere to clean the air, and filter our water. Yet depending on their species, not all record long-term environmental changes, such as fires, floods and droughts, in the same way. 

By analyzing how various types of tree rings grow in response to these distinct weather-related events, researchers discovered that some can act as useful tools in managing local watersheds, that drain water into nearby streams and rivers. 

Specifically, they found that trees in the Midwest are extremely apt at recalling past wet and dry conditions, noting that using more than one type of tree’s rings to reconstruct previous environmental periods can paint a much more accurate picture of the region’s current water ecosystem.

“One human lifespan is not going to show us the big picture,” said Alessandra Bertucci, lead author of the study and a graduate student in food, agricultural and biological engineering at The Ohio State University. “So using trees to address these gaps of understanding is really important for managing water resources, even in intensively managed watersheds.“ 

According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, healthy watersheds serve nature by helping to ensure water quality, connecting aquatic habitats and ecosystems, and shaping diverse biological communities. But when left unprotected, they eventually degrade, leading to issues like less productive fisheries and polluted drinking water.

Consequently, as the planet continues to warm and water resources are impacted, learning new ways to manage altered watersheds is an urgent priority, said Bertucci. The research was presented this week at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

While tree ring chronologies are often used to understand long-term climate changes in the western United States, the tool is often left out of similar studies of the Midwest, where large-scale agricultural production relies heavily on the health of local watersheds. Additionally, already scarce instrumental data in some areas can make it difficult for researchers to grasp historical trends in the region, resulting in misleading estimates about past events, said Bertucci. 

These hurdles motivated Bertucci’s team to retrieve tree cores from places where watershed data reporting is sorely lacking, such the Old Woman Creek State Nature Preserve near Lake Erie in northern Ohio. There, they took samples from three species of common riparian trees and will plan to compare aspects like ring width and density to real recorded climate data.

Now, with updated measurements, the team expects to be able to build models that could predict how weather and local water flow will change over the next few decades. 

“If we can round out that historical data and understand what to expect, we can better plan for how to manage our water resources in the future,” said Bertucci. These improved solutions might include helping local resource managers determine which environmental conditions to focus on accounting for when coming up with smart water-saving strategies. 

In the future, the team will work to increase the range of tree species they sample and utilize the expanded data they gather to create better reconstruction models of other important watersheds. These models may be especially helpful to farmers in the Midwest, and later on, the United States as a whole. 

“Water is life,” said Bertucci. “We literally cannot live without it, so it’s important to protect and make sure that we are taking care of it, because that is our lifeline.”

Bertucci conducted the research with Lorrayne Miralha, assistant professor of food, agricultural and biological engineering at Ohio State. 

The study is the first genome-scale analysis of any African acacias and focuses on the umbrella acacia, an iconic feature of the African savanna. 

Researchers compared the genetic response to drought stress of the umbrella acacia (Vachellia tortilis) and one of its hundreds of relatives, the splendid thorn acacia (Vachellia robusta) more commonly found in wetter regions of East Africa. 

Results showed that once water becomes scarce, the umbrella acacia continues its conversion of carbon dioxide and water from sunlight into nutrients through photosynthesis and uses up all the water it can access. 

“You would expect most plants, if they’re being water stressed, will shut down, but at the early stage of drought stress, umbrella acacias ramp up – they go for broke,” said senior author James Pease, associate professor of evolution, ecology and organismal biology at The Ohio State University. 

“The splendid thorn acacia tends to be more of a water saver – holding on to water, not growing a lot. Umbrella acacia does the opposite – it tries to grow more and do more photosynthesis and capture more carbon that it’s going to stockpile,” he said. “Once water’s not going to come for a while, it lets the above-ground biomass die and waits for water to try again the next season.” 

The research was published recently in The Plant Journal. 

Umbrella acacias provide a staple food for giraffes, are sources of a global wood economy and the common food additive gum arabic, and are part of the legume family – all reasons to understand how genetics shape their drought tolerance at the cellular level, researchers say.

“They have to grow in these hyper-arid conditions that are really difficult for a large woody plant to grow in. They’re being eaten by giraffes, they’re being knocked over by elephants. They have to compete with the grasses. The grasses catch fire. So there’s this whole set of pressures on them,” Pease said. 

“Drought stress and climate habitat shifts are not a unique problem to African acacias. But there are very few genomic studies of tropical trees and how water stress impacts them.” 

Seedlings of umbrella and splendid thorn acacias were grown in the lab and watered for three months, after which they were divided into two conditions: continued normal watering or complete shutoff of water – the onset of drought. Researchers collected leaves on a weekly basis and selected samples for genomic analysis representing an early drought phase, the middle of a downward slope in tree health, and severe drought. 

To compare each species’ response to the drought stress, the team sequenced their transcriptomes – the collection of RNA readouts of DNA instructions that indicate gene activity, and related protein changes, across the genome. 

The model system represents the time of life when the trees are most at risk of dying. 

“This early seedling establishment phase is when a lot of them either make it or don’t based on their habits of how well they can acquire energy and water,” Pease said. 

The researchers believe that umbrella acacias maintain their pattern of intense nutrient collection and above-ground biomass decline for years, developing a huge root mass in the process. 

“If you dig up a little acacia seedling, it has a tree’s worth of roots. And once it gets the right combination of water and nutrients, it has the rootstock to support a full tree and it will transition to that,” he said. 

“This is the same strategy of grasses. They keep maintaining that root and will wait for water and try again – you can see that in lawns that dry out. It’s really interesting to us because that’s what grasses do, as opposed to most herbaceous plants and other trees.” 

In contrast, the study showed that the splendid thorn acacia behaved in a more expected way for a tree under drought stress: investing in water conservation and cellular function maintenance while riding out the drought. 

The transcriptome analysis showed the trees used similar genetic systems to regulate photosynthesis and maintain biological stability during drought stress – but the two species activated these systems with different sets of genes and on differing time scales, said first author Ellen Weinheimer, who worked on the study as a biology graduate student at Wake Forest University, where Pease was a faculty member until 2024. 

The analytical method also revealed these genetic differences in drought response were not driven by genetic mutations, the sequence changes occurring over time that evolutionary scientists have historically tracked. 

“You don’t necessarily see gene sequences and gene expression changing together,” said Weinheimer, now a postdoctoral associate at the Yale School of Medicine. “The genes that are differentially expressed in response to drought don’t necessarily have sequence changes, which shows that those two mechanisms are largely independent of each other.” 

Tracking gene expression alongside sequence changes in plants, animals and other systems is a focus of Pease’s lab. 

“We’re layering how gene expression levels are changing among different species,” he said. “And over evolutionary time, we’re finding expression as important as the mutations, in that a mutation in one gene could affect the expression of another gene. We’re learning very different things than we would if we just looked at the mutations.” 

This research was supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation. 

Additional co-authors were Scott Cory, Nicholas Kortessis and T. Michael Anderson of Wake Forest.

This stickiness, known as carbon monoxide (CO) adsorption energy, is a property that can often decide the final product of a chemical reaction. Using a widely accessible advanced electroanalytical technique, researchers found that the strength of this energy actually relies on a mix of reaction factors, including the type of catalyst material, applied voltage, and the surface’s structure.

This is a major step for the field, as gaining a better understanding of how CO adsorption works in real-time can help scientists search for innovative ways to recycle its counterpart, carbon dioxide, into useful fuel products, like methanol and ethanol. By designing better catalysts, these new insights could be used to accelerate the development of cleaner technologies that support a more sustainable future, said Zhihao Cui, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral student in chemistry at The Ohio State University.

“Our approach provides a vital bridge between theory and experiment by helping guide the design of catalysts that can convert CO₂ into useful liquid fuels more efficiently,” said Cui. 

The study was recently published in Nature Catalysis.

Until now, researchers lacked an experimental method to measure carbon monoxide’s binding strength under real reaction conditions, meaning scientists’ theoretical predictions about reaction results were limited in their ability to capture the complexities of electrocatalytic environments. Yet with this study’s method, the team was able to validate their theories by viewing how carbon monoxide interacts with materials like gold and copper, insights that could guide the design of more efficient catalysts for carbon conversion. 

Researchers found that while carbon monoxide can bond with gold and copper with similar strengths, only copper is capable of generating multi-carbon products from CO₂. These relatively surprising results reveal that the CO adsorption process is actually more complex than researchers previously thought, said Anne Co, co-author of the study and a professor in chemistry and biochemistry at Ohio State. 

“Carbon dioxide is such a stable molecule, so it's hard to break down,” said Co. “Whether it takes two or twelve steps to complete a reaction, it usually requires a lot of energy.”  

While chemists typically use electrochemistry to generate and store the energy needed, streamlining the process using this team’s new framework could make it easier to realize the energy needs of a potential chemical reaction. Importantly, it’s a significant step in designing better, more sustainable fuels, said Cui, especially since the method is simple enough not to require expensive equipment and can be easily adapted for other types of catalysts. 

“Our framework enables other researchers to extend the same experiment to a wide range of catalysts,” said Cui. 

Researchers noted that while their method does have some limitations, next steps include plans to further refine their model and methods in order to yield more nuanced insights into the chemical world. 

“Even a very simple technique such as the one we used in this study can make a really huge difference in this field,” said Cui. “So as long as your idea is new, you may be able to measure something that was previously considered impossible to measure.”

Other Ohio State co-authors include Kassidy Aztergo and Jiseon Hwang. The study was supported by the National Science Foundation. 

Findings showed that communities that added green infrastructure — systems designed to protect the natural water cycle, such as rain gardens or constructed wetlands — saw a notable reduction in cadmium, copper, nickel and zinc being sent into local waterways. All of these are heavy metals harmful to human health in large concentrations. 

Using these systems to manage stormwater flow at the source is imperative to preserving our environment, said Joseph Smith, lead author of the study and a researcher in food, agricultural and biological engineering at The Ohio State University. 

“Humans cause a lot of alterations to the environment,” said Smith. “So things like rain gardens allow nature to return to how it’s supposed to work.” 

The study was recently published in the Journal of Hazardous Materials. 

The project is part of Blueprint Columbus, a 30-year community effort to install green infrastructure into local neighborhoods. The goal is to address sanitary sewer overflows and reduce total suspended solids pollution in runoff by 20%.

After studying the performance of two watersheds in the Clintonville neighborhood of Columbus in managing stormwater pollution for about 3.5 years, researchers found that once installed, green infrastructure systems exceeded expectations, from mitigating peak storm flow rates and pollution to potentially improving residents’ well-being and altering local biodiversity. In one particular neighborhood, researchers noted that rain gardens worked to prevent a good amount of heavy metal pollution from entering downstream waterways. 

Additionally, because their results were compared to a control watershed – one without green infrastructure – the study was robust enough to determine that the changes the team saw in hydrology, water quality and heavy metals were due to the presence of rain gardens, not seasonal or annual fluctuations in climate, said Smith. 

In short, implementing more of these systems in urban areas could make the city’s ecosystems healthier and more resilient, said Smith. “Not only does green infrastructure improve water quality, but it also helps cities to be cooler because it adds more green space. The goal is to design spaces where people want to walk around and enjoy beautiful surroundings and experience the many ecosystem services created,” he said. 

According to the paper, many of these benefits can also be attributed to the design and continued maintenance of the city’s connected green infrastructure systems. 

“Ohio State’s been involved in this project from multiple angles,” said Smith. “But what made our study really special is that we could see changes that were happening at the pipe level leading to the stream.”

Their results also suggest that engaging with communities to improve public acceptance and functionality of these green measures is of the utmost priority, said Smith. Notably, the long-term success of the project may be achieved by educating homeowners about the benefits of having and maintaining these systems, as some citizens have opposed the addition of green systems to their neighborhoods, raising concerns over safety and convenience. 

“Being involved in this watershed-scale rain garden project has made me realize that while there are lots of benefits for the community, there’s also more we can do to explain how these projects help individuals who live there,” said Smith. 

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, investing in green infrastructure also helps create jobs and other lucrative economic development opportunities for the public. 

For the time being, Blueprint Columbus is expected to continue retrofitting more areas of the city with green infrastructure through at least 2043. Hundreds of rain gardens already exist across the city, but this work emphasizes how important and beneficial it is to protect the environment through proven, eco-friendly methods. 

“Columbus is becoming a leader and model for other municipalities that are facing similar problems,” said Smith. 

Other co-authors include Kay Bernard, Kathryn Boening-Ulman, Jay Martin, R. Andrew Tirpak, David Wituszynski and Ryan Winston, all from Ohio State. This study was supported by the City of Columbus, Ohio. 

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.

Take, for instance, the Pacific Ocean. The largest and deepest ocean basin on the planet, it is a vital wheel in many complex ecological systems, including the carbon cycle. But despite its vast influence, much of what scientists know about the Pacific stems from only a few continuous long sediment core records recovered over the last five decades, said Elizabeth Griffith, co-author of a new paper and a professor in earth sciences at The Ohio State University.

“It's easy to forget that two-thirds of our planet is covered with salty ocean water, especially when you don’t live near the coast,” said Griffith. “It’s also hard to realize just how much of it we haven’t explored yet.”

The commentary paper was recently published in the journal Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology.

In past decades, studying the physical environment of the deep ocean could be a challenging endeavor, partly due to how difficult and time-consuming it is to reach these dark and undiscovered depths. Fortunately, scientists today largely rely on scientific ocean drilling to collect important marine samples, a process that involves specialized ships that use cutting-edge technology to bore down and extract sediment cores from the ocean floor.  

Depending on where sediment cores are collected, scientists are able to learn many novel things about Earth’s history and dynamics. For example, samples retrieved from places known as Pacific Highs, undersea shallow geological features that have the potential for well-preserved paleoceanographic records, have helped scientists answer key research questions about subjects like the evolution of life, past extinction events, Earth’s tectonic and volcanic history as well as slight changes in its orbit. 

While only eight of these sites, found in the central and western North Pacific, have ever been explored using modern drilling technologies, discoveries made in these locations offer valuable insights into some of the most dynamic environmental shifts of the past 100 million years, said Griffith. 

“When you’re extrapolating from such a huge time and spatial scale, you need more than one or two data points to get complete records and ground truth modeling,” she said. 

Yet as global temperatures continue to rise and cores collected from these sites are depleted of material that might help reveal key events, new data is needed to continuously improve future climate models and transform our understanding of Earth’s complex life systems. 

To better prioritize research questions best answered by future ocean drilling discoveries, the international scientific ocean drilling community held a workshop in October 2024 at The Ohio State University’s Stone Laboratory.

Participants determined that in order for ocean discovery science to move forward, scientists will need to create both short- and long-term plans for recovering these sediments. 

“One of the benefits of the ocean drilling community has always been that it’s a larger effort,” said Griffith. “There’s support for this idea that we’re answering big questions on a scale that you just can’t do in a single lab or just working with a small subset of people.”

Overall, researchers suggest that future reconstructions of Earth’s past environmental stages will require more data, as gaps in spatial and temporal data coverage hinder the community’s ability to test various hypotheses and validate model simulations of the Pacific Ocean’s behavior during different climate states. Notably, existing sediment core materials are too degraded to apply some new techniques to test these models. 

The paper also notes that taking the time to dig deep into whatever long-buried secrets our ocean floors hold will also be beneficial in predicting what tomorrow’s climate future might entail, said Griffith. “Warm periods in Earth’s recent history might tell us something about future conditions on Earth and how life will respond to those changes,” she said. 

Nevertheless, while drillship expeditions allow scientists to study some of Earth’s most challenging environments, they also require massive amounts of coordinated international collaboration. Ocean drilling science must expand on these opportunities to grow, but with the recent loss of a U.S. riserless drillship, next-generation scientists worry that losing access to vital data now could jeopardize the field. 

“Working with legacy core material is a crucial part of my research, but it will never replicate the experience of sailing on a deep-sea scientific drilling expedition and fostering international collaboration at sea,” said Batoul Saad, co-author of the paper and a PhD student in earth sciences at Ohio State. 

While private and public sector leaders work to preserve U.S. federal research funding, scientific experts suggest identifying new opportunities to expand international, collaborative science and help sustain ocean drilling science.

“As individuals, much of the work of supporting science involves just being curious about the planet that we live on and that sustains us,” said Griffith. “Once you become curious, realizing how much you impact your surroundings leads to better decisions and new scientific discoveries.”

The U.S. Science Support Program provided financial support for U.S. participants in the workshop, while Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation), European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling MagellanPlus Workshop Series Travel Grant, Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, and Australian and New Zealand International Scientific Drilling Consortium provided support for international participants. The National Science Foundation is supported by the U.S. Science Support Program. 

Thomas Westerhold of the University of Bremen in Germany was a co-author. 

Researchers found that a pain receptor called TRPA1 becomes less sensitive in mosquitoes when exposed to heat, meaning that the chemical cues that typically trigger insect avoidance behaviors are prevented from activating as strongly. 

TRPA1, also known as the “wasabi receptor,” helps animals detect noxious heat and harmful chemicals. In humans, this receptor can induce eye and skin irritation. In mosquitoes, it influences which hosts the insects find most alluring – specifically, those unprotected by repellents that drive them away, said Peter Piermarini, co-author of the paper and a professor of entomology at The Ohio State University.

“What we found was that the chemicals were not able to activate the mosquito wasabi receptor as effectively when temperatures exceeded the heat activation threshold,” said Piermarini. “So the mosquito would find certain repellents less irritating in hotter weather.”

Typical insect repellents create a chemical barrier that discourages proximity and prevents mosquitoes from reaching their target. Yet because their receptors are desensitized in warmer temperatures, natural substances like citronellal and catnip oil, known for their repellent properties, would be less effective. 

“Products with those ingredients may be less effective if you’re using them at temperatures that are considered extreme heat events,” said Piermarini. Additionally, as the climate warms, more extended breeding periods per season will worsen the spread of mosquito-borne disease. 

The study was recently published in the journal Pesticide Biochemistry and Physiology. 

Piermarini and Yeaeun Park, co-author of the study and a graduate student in environmental sciences at Ohio State, discovered the changes by removing TRPA1 mosquito receptors and injecting them into frog egg cells, a technique often used for making receptor proteins in the lab. 

Then, they tested how the receptors would react to citronellal and catnip oil under normal and high temperatures. The receptors were activated, but were less sensitive to the substances at higher temperatures. “It was very close to what we predicted,” said Piermarini. 

In a second experiment, the researchers studied how fully grown female mosquitoes reacted when confronted with either repellent at different temperatures. When temperatures exceeded 32 degrees Celsius, the mosquitoes were less likely to avoid the substances, suggesting they might behave similarly in the wild. 

Still, there is some defense against mosquito bites. When the team tested a synthetic mosquito repellent called DEET, they found that because it does not interact with the wasabi receptor to repel mosquitos, its efficacy was not impacted by higher temperatures.

“This suggests that during the hottest days of the year you’d probably want to stick with a more conventional synthetic repellent and avoid using a natural product with citronella or catnip oil,” said Piermarini. 

Piermarini said the team will continue to investigate the specific mechanisms behind temperature-induced desensitization of the TRPA1 receptor, and they hope to study the phenomenon in a more comprehensive manner, potentially with the help of human participants. 

“The more we learn about the mechanisms by which these natural products work, it can help us determine which ones might be better to use under certain conditions,” said Piermarini. “Understanding these limitations can potentially save lives.”

This research was supported by Ohio State, the Sigma Xi Grants in Aid of Research (GIAR) program, and the National Institutes of Health. 

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.

A new study gets scientists closer to more fully understanding where viruses fit into the global ocean picture of cycling nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorous and, of particular interest, carbon. The research broadly expands on a 20-year-old finding that genes can be exchanged between viruses and the photosynthetic cells they infect and consolidates data resulting from more than 100 papers on viruses and metabolism that followed. 

The research team, led by The Ohio State University, reports in the journal Microbiome on its creation of a catalog of genes that viruses “stole” from the marine microbes they infected across all of the world’s oceans. Scientists identified and organized almost 23,000 genes known as auxiliary metabolic genes (AMGs), including over 7,000 never previously documented. The analysis suggests that about 1 in 5 ocean virus populations carries at least one AMG. 

Adding even more context to the viruses’ role, the researchers mapped 340 metabolic pathways attributed to microbes in the oceans – changes to the nutrient balance resulting from organisms consuming and generating molecules based on their survival needs. Of those, the scientists found that viral AMGs mapped to 128 pathways – meaning viruses affected over 37% of those processes. 

“We still don’t know the extent of viruses’ impact. But now that we know the pathways that viruses target via AMGs, we could use metabolic modeling approaches to quantitatively estimate the viral impact on the host communities and ocean functioning,” said first study author Funing Tian, who completed the work as a PhD student in microbiology at Ohio State. 

“Future modeling work could involve increasing or decreasing metabolic fluxes occurring through these pathways and seeing how the impact of viruses would change.” 

Tian and her co-lead author, former Ohio State microbiology postdoctoral scholar James Wainaina, focused on DNA viruses that infect prokaryotes: bacteria and other single-celled organisms floating throughout the world’s oceans.

Wainaina and Tian were members of the lab led by the study’s senior author, Matthew Sullivan, professor of microbiology and founding director of the Center of Microbiome Science at Ohio State. 

Sullivan was the virus coordinator for the Tara Oceans Consortium, a three-year global study of the impact of climate change on the world’s oceans. As part of that international collaboration, he has led previous work to catalog close to 200,000 DNA and 5,500 RNA virus species in the oceans, and to ascertain viruses’ potential to mitigate climate change. 

Tian and Wainaina analyzed 7.6 terabytes of Tara Oceans metagenomic sequence data for this study, increasing the known ocean DNA virus populations to 579,904. From these populations, the team took many computational steps to identify the auxiliary metabolic genes located in virus genomes. 

They conservatively identified a total of 86,913 AMGs that grouped into 22,779 sequence-based gene clusters. Of those, 7,248 were identified for the first time. Viruses lift these genes from the microbial cells they infect and incorporate the genes into their own genome – giving them the power to reprogram a host cell’s function in a way that ensures viral survival. 

“The challenge with auxiliary metabolic genes is that people know they’re there, but the gene is similar to the cellular copy – that makes it important to differentiate between the viral copy and the microbial copy,” Wainaina said. 

“To minimize false positives, we undertook curation steps to make sure we focused only on AMGs that were on viral genome segments,” Tian said. 

They then further analyzed the genomic data to determine metabolic pathways – each one a series of related actions that alter a cell’s function – that could be traced to specific microbial species, revealing 340 such pathways. With their new catalog of “stolen” genes, the researchers found that 128 of these pathways were targeted by viral AMGs.

“That’s our big finding,” Tian said. “Before this paper, it was unknown how many metabolic pathways were encoded in microbes throughout the global oceans, and even less understood among those how many were targeted by viruses via AMGs.” 

Added Wainaina, “It’s not only about the number, but also which specific pathways viruses are involved in – that informs the biogeochemical cycles viruses are reprogramming and manipulating in the ocean.” 

The AMG catalog and metabolic pathway mapping provide a foundation for microbiome engineering experimentation and modeling that will help researchers make more accurate predictions about viruses’ roles in ocean biogeochemical processes, Sullivan said. 

“Most current models don’t include viruses at all, and only some include microbes,” he said. “It’s exciting that we’ve generated these data that are critical for bringing viruses and their impacts into new predictive models.” 

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the G. Unger Vetlese and Ambrose Monell Foundations, and the Ohio Supercomputer Center.

Tian is now a bioinformatician at the University of Chicago, and Wainaina is an assistant scientist in the Biology Department at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. Additional co-authors include Cristina Howard-Varona, Guillermo Domínguez-Huerta, Benjamin Bolduc, Garrett Smith, Marissa Gittrich, Olivier Zablocki and Dylan Cronin of Ohio State; Maria Consuelo Gazitúa of Viromica Consulting; Damien Eveillard of Nantes Université; and Steven Hallam of the University of British Columbia.

In a new study, researchers have determined through both statistical analysis and in experiments that soil pH is a driver of microbial community composition – but that the need to address toxicity released during nitrogen cycling ultimately shapes the final microbial community. 

“The physical environment is affecting the nature of microbial interactions, and that affects the assembly of the community,” said co-lead author Karna Gowda, assistant professor of microbiology at The Ohio State University. “People in the field understood these two things must be important at some level, but there wasn’t a lot of evidence for it. We’re adding some specificity and mechanisms to this idea.” 

The work helps clarify the microbial underpinnings of global nitrogen cycling and may provide a new way to think about emissions of nitrous oxide, a potent greenhouse gas, Gowda said. 

The research was published recently in Nature Microbiology. 

Microbes keep soil healthy and productive by recycling nutrients, and are particularly important for converting nitrogen into forms that plants can use. Underground organisms living in the same environment are also highly interconnected, preying on each other, participating in chemical exchanges and providing community benefits. 

For this work, Gowda and colleagues used a dataset from a worldwide collection of topsoil samples, sequencing the genomes of microbes present in the samples and analyzing important characteristics of the soil – such as nitrogen and carbon content and pH, a measure of soil’s acidity. 

“We wanted to look at trends that were widespread and that would manifest around the planet across very different environments,” Gowda said.

With billions of bacteria present in a sample of soil, the researchers relied on the genetic makeup of microbial communities to determine their functional roles. 

The team zeroed in on genes that identified which bacteria were involved in denitrification – converting nitrogen compounds from bioavailable forms into nitrous oxide and dinitrogen gas that’s released in the atmosphere. A bioinformatics analysis showed that soil pH was the most important environmental factor associated with the abundance of these organisms. 

To test the statistical finding, the researchers conducted lab enrichment experiments, running a natural microbial community through different conditions of growth. 

During denitrification, specific enzymes have roles in the conversion of nitrate into various nitrogen-containing compounds. One of these forms, nitrite, is more toxic in acidic soil (low pH) than it is under neutral conditions with higher pH. 

The experiments showed that strains with enzymes called Nar, linked to creating toxic nitrite, and strains with enzymes called Nap, linked to consuming nitrite, fluctuated based on the acidity of the soil. 

“We found more of Nar at low pH and less of Nap, and vice versa as the soil pH moved toward neutral,” Gowda said. “So we see two different types of organisms prevalent at acidic versus neutral pH, but we also find that that’s actually not explaining what’s going on. It’s not just the environment that’s determining who’s there – it’s actually the environment plus interactions between more organisms in the community. 

“This means that pH is affecting the interaction between organisms in the community in a more or less consistent way – it’s always about the toxicity of nitrite. And this highlights how different bacteria work together to thrive in varying soil pH levels.” 

That finding was novel and important, Gowda said. Bacteria and other microorganisms are known to be driven by a will to survive, but they also rely on each other to stay safe – and that cooperation has implications for environmental health, the research suggests. 

“While individual fitness effects clearly play a role in defining patterns in many contexts, interactions are likely essential to explaining patterns in a variety of other contexts,” the authors wrote. 

Understanding how interactions and the environment affect nitrous oxide emissions could provide new insights into reducing this potent greenhouse gas, Gowda said: Denitrifying bacteria are key sources and sinks of nitrous oxide in agricultural soils. While past studies have focused on the behavior of these nitrous oxide-emitting organisms in different pH conditions, considering their ecological interactions may offer new strategies to lower emissions. 

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the University of Chicago, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, a James S. McDonnell Foundation Postdoctoral Fellowship Award, and a Fannie and John Hertz Fellowship Award.

Co-authors include Seppe Kuehn, Kyle Crocker, Kiseok Keith Lee, Milena Chakraverti-Wuerthwein and Zeqian Li of the University of Chicago; Mikhail Tikhonov of Washington University in St. Louis; and Madhav Mani of Northwestern University.

The middle of the United States, meanwhile, can expect bigger swings between wetter wet periods – high-rainfall years known as pluvials – and drier summers through the rest of this century, the study predicts. 

Researchers at The Ohio State University say the findings, based on modern precipitation data, historical tree rings and climate models spanning the years 850 to 2100, suggest climate change has shifted precipitation patterns across North America to extremes that were not experienced before industrialization began around the mid-1800s. 

“It’s very much a tale of Southwest versus the Northeast for most of the seasons,” said senior author James Stagge, assistant professor of civil, environmental and geodetic engineering at Ohio State. “Mexico and the American Southwest tends to get drier across more or less all seasons, whereas we’re seeing in the Northeast – and Ohio is included in that – a trend toward wetter, particularly in the winter and early spring.” 

The combination of drier droughts and wetter pluvials in much of the nation’s midsection won’t necessarily occur in a predictable way. 

“So you might be going from, say, this year our drought is really bad, and in five years or so we might see the wettest pluvial we’ve had in a while,” Stagge said. “That variability is concerning because it changes how we might need to manage water to prepare for more extremes in both ways. Trying to plan for that is a real challenge. 

“This is all part of the same pattern moving into the future. It’s only going to get worse.” 

Former Ohio State graduate student Kyungmin Sung, now a research fellow at the Korea Environment Institute, is first author of the paper. The research is published today (Sept. 6, 2024) in Geophysical Research Letters. 

In contrast to attribution studies that examine whether or how human-associated climate change has influenced extreme weather events, this work focused on documenting centuries-long trends in pre- and post-industrial drought and pluvial extremes across North America.  

The researchers compared changing climate patterns observed in the past 20 years to the pre-industrial era and then predicted how periods of low and high precipitation will trend through the year 2100. 

“What we can say is, ‘here is the scale of change we’ve seen in the past 100 years under an increase in greenhouse gas concentration, and here’s what we saw in the previous 700 years,’” Sung said. “And the scale of the change we’re seeing now and into the future is dramatically larger in many areas than any natural climate variability we saw prior.” 

The researchers merged data from five sources: two modern compilations of precipitation observations, tree ring reconstructions from the distant past, and two climate models – each covering the same historical period as the tree ring analyses and continuing to predict future extreme dry and wet trends with increasing greenhouse gases.  

The integration of different data types lends credibility to the findings, Stagge said: “A benefit of having very different types of data is they can fill in each other’s gaps. We consider trends to be significant only when they’re showing up across multiple data sets – so that increases our confidence.”

Maps of the changing climate patterns show the method produced smooth spatial transitions and obvious boundaries, suggesting that “what we’re seeing is real,” he said. 

While the drying of the West is a well-known phenomenon, the team was surprised to see how extensive the precipitation increase has been and will be in the Northeast and how dramatic the heightened variability from droughts to pluvials is going to be in the center of the country. 

These patterns of water shortages and gluts could affect industries ranging from farming to construction and city planning, and are likely to strain management efforts to maintain household water-source reservoirs at optimum levels. 

“Planners, government agencies and engineers want to do the right thing and plan for a potentially changing climate, but oftentimes they don’t necessarily have the numbers or the broader picture of what’s going to be happening where,” Stagge said. “This puts regions on notice. In the Southwest, you’re going to have less water to deal with, and if you’re managing a farm in the middle of the country you might be seeing wider swings between droughts and pluvials. 

“Certainly, we’d like to arrest further climate change, but it takes a long time to turn that ship,” he said. “In the meantime, we should be planning on where we’re headed to decrease impacts on people, the economy and the environment.” 

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation, the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at Ohio State, and the Ohio Supercomputer Center. Gil Bohrer of Ohio State was also a co-author of the paper.

By combining genomic sequencing data with artificial intelligence analysis, researchers have identified ocean-based viruses and assessed their genomes to find that they “steal” genes from other microbes or cells that process carbon in the sea. Mapping microbial metabolism genes, including those for underwater carbon metabolism, revealed 340 known metabolic pathways throughout the global oceans. Of these, 128 were also found in the genomes of ocean viruses. 

“I was shocked that the number was that high,” said Matthew Sullivan, professor of microbiology and director of the Center of Microbiome Science at The Ohio State University.

Having mined this massive trove of data via advances in computation, the team has now revealed which viruses have a role in carbon metabolism and are using this information in newly developed community metabolic models to help predict how using viruses to engineer the ocean microbiome toward better carbon capture would look.

“The modeling is about how viruses may dial up or dial down microbial activity in the system,” Sullivan said. “Community metabolic modeling is telling me the dream data point: which viruses are targeting the most important metabolic pathways, and that matters because it means they’re good levers to pull on.”

Sullivan presented the research today (Feb. 17, 2024) at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Denver.

Sullivan was the virus coordinator for the Tara Oceans Consortium, a three-year global study of the impact of climate change on the world’s oceans and the source of 35,000 water samples containing the microbial bounty. His lab focuses on phages, viruses that infect bacteria, and their potential to be scaled up in an engineering framework to manipulate marine microbes into converting carbon into the heaviest organic form that will sink to the ocean floor.

“Oceans soak up carbon, and that buffers us against climate change. CO2 is absorbed as a gas, and its conversion into organic carbon is dictated by microbes,” Sullivan said. “What we’re seeing now is that viruses target the most important reactions in these microbial community metabolisms. This means we can start investigating which viruses could be used to convert carbon toward the kind we want.

“In other words, can we strengthen this massive ocean buffer to be a carbon sink to buy time against climate change, as opposed to that carbon being released back into the atmosphere to accelerate it?”

In 2016, the Tara team determined that carbon sinking in the ocean was related to the presence of viruses. It is thought that viruses help sink carbon when virus-infected carbon-processing cells cluster into larger, sticky aggregates that drop to the ocean floor. The researchers developed AI-based analytics to identify from thousands of viruses which few are “VIP” viruses to culture in the lab and work with as model systems for ocean geoengineering.

This new community metabolic modeling, developed by collaborator Professor Damien Eveillard of the Tara Oceans Consortium, helps them understand what unintended consequences might be of such an approach. Sullivan’s lab is taking these oceanic lessons learned and applying them to using viruses to engineer microbiomes in human settings to aid recovery from spinal cord injury, improve outcomes for infants born to mothers with HIV, combat infection in burn wounds, and more. 

“The conversation we’re having is, ‘How much of this is transferable?’” said Sullivan, also a professor of civil, environmental and geodetic engineering. “The overall goal is engineering microbiomes toward what we think is something useful.” 

He also reported on early efforts to use phages as geoengineering tools in an entirely different ecosystem: the permafrost in northern Sweden, where microbes both change the climate and respond to climate change as the frozen soil thaws. Virginia Rich, associate professor of microbiology at Ohio State, is co-director of the National Science Foundation-funded EMERGE Biology Integration Institute based at Ohio State that organizes the microbiome science at the Sweden field site. Rich also co-led previous research that identified a lineage of single-cell organisms in the thawing permafrost soil as a significant producer of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. 

Rich co-organized the AAAS session with Ruth Varner of the University of New Hampshire, who co-directs the EMERGE Institute, which is focusing on better understanding how microbiomes respond to permafrost thaw and the resulting climate interactions. 

Sullivan’s talk was titled “From ecosystems biology to managing microbiomes with viruses,” and was presented at the session titled “Microbiome-Targeted Ecosystem Management: Small Players, Big Roles.” 

Funing Tian, a PhD student in microbiology, and microbiology postdoctoral scholar James Wainaina made significant contributions to the community metabolic modeling work.

The oceans work is supported by the National Science Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and Tara Oceans, and, in addition to the NSF, the soils work has been funded by the Department of Energy and the Grantham Foundation.

Their findings, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, reveal that by combining direct air carbon dioxide capture technologies (DACC) and geothermal energy, large-scale carbon dioxide (CO₂) removal systems could potentially be supplied with enough energy to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and safely store it underground. 

Emitted when humans burn fossil fuels for things like heat, electricity and transportation, carbon dioxide accounts for the majority of greenhouse gases emitted by human activities in the atmosphere. Because this accumulation is one of the main drivers of climate change, efforts to address the excess have focused on methods for extracting carbon dioxide, either at the original source of emission or directly from the air. 

“Carbon removal technologies are especially helpful in mitigating climate change because we can capture types of emissions that would be hard to cap in other ways,” said Martina Leveni, lead author of the study and a postdoctoral scholar in civil, environmental and geodetic engineering at The Ohio State University. “So we thought, could we combine technologies that could be beneficial to one another to meet this goal more efficiently?” 

Typical DACC methods can be expensive and require energy to operate, adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, said Leveni. But she set out to investigate if it was possible to integrate the recycled carbon dioxide into the system to make it more efficient.

Called Direct Air CO₂ Capture with  CO₂ Utilization and Storage (DACCUS), Leveni’s proposed method uses the natural heat stored beneath the Earth’s surface within deep saline aquifers – underground geologic formations containing sedimentary rock and saltwater – to continuously produce renewable energy for DACC systems. The carbon dioxide captured from the air is isolated in these geologic formations, and part of it can be circulated to extract the geothermal heat. This circulation brings the heat to the surface, where it can either be used directly or converted to electricity to power the system. 

Such a system requires a lot of energy, which can often mean more pollution. But it’s an issue their work accounts for, said Jeff Bielicki, co-author of the study and an associate professor in civil, environmental and geodetic engineering and the John Glenn College of Public Affairs at Ohio State. 

Geothermal energy in general has a very small carbon footprint, and this particular approach is even lower because it uses carbon dioxide, Bielicki said.  

To demonstrate the potential of their system, the researchers developed a case study of how it might work in the U.S. Gulf Coast region. They determined that DACCUS could be deployed there to great success, due to it being well-known for having ample geothermal resources.  

“The Gulf Coast also has the right geology to safely put carbon dioxide underground and a decent enough heat flux that its geothermal energy could be sufficient to use,” said Bielicki. “These characteristics are very favorable.”

In order for their system to work, the geothermal heat extraction system first has to be primed, much like a car engine. That takes about five years of storing carbon from point sources, such as factories that emit carbon dioxide, before a DACCUS facility begins extracting the greenhouse gas from the air. Assuming their system could be operational by 2025, the study suggests its method could start removing carbon by 2030. The researchers estimate there could be as many as 25 DACCUS systems set up in just one of the 27 geologic formations in the Gulf Coast by 2050. 

Nevertheless, this study offers hope for our climate future by emphasizing the importance of fusing new ideas and concepts together to better reach a faraway goal, said Leveni. The study suggests that if implemented, this team’s work could even help society meet the current goal of limiting Earth’s warming, while averting some of the worst consequences of climate change. 

“New technologies can enable one another, and in integrating them, we can tackle climate change,” said Leveni. “There’s a lot of work to be done to take into account technological readiness and the policies needed to make that research happen.” 

The study was supported by the Sloan Foundation and The Ohio State LEGACY Postdoctoral Scholars Program.

Nestled within the central Peruvian Andes lies Nevado Huascarán, a tropical mountain whose glaciers preserve the climate histories of the entire region. Researchers have long been interested in studying this area, because unlike ice cores recovered from the poles, core samples taken from tropical areas of the world can reveal a wealth of information about phenomena like El Niño and seasonal monsoons. 

The study, by researchers from The Ohio State University and published in JGR Atmospheres, involves four ice core samples – two from mountain col, which is the lowest point between two ridges, and for the first time, two from the summit, nearly 7,000 meters above sea level. 

The researchers compared the oxygen-stable isotope records preserved in glacial ice at these different elevations on the mountain. Scientists who study ice cores use isotopes as a proxy for temperature change over time, but in tropical regions interpreting the isotope records can be a more complex process.

Their findings showed that the isotope records share a statistically significant relationship with sea surface temperatures in the Pacific and with rainfall over tropical South America. The oxygen-stable isotopes from the summit were also found to be more sensitive to large-scale changes in tropical Pacific sea surface temperature than the ones found at the lower levels of the mountain.

This is significant because it suggests that depending on the elevation, past climate histories recorded by the oxygen-stable isotopes may reveal different mechanisms or stories about the region. Overall, their results suggest that the influence of tropical Pacific climate on the summit isotope records is increasing, likely due to the rapid rates of climate change observed in recent decades.

“From a paleo-climate perspective, the data tells us that these cores may be useful for looking at the history of El Niño in the tropics,” said Austin Weber, lead author of the study and a PhD student in the School of Earth Sciences and the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center at Ohio State. “And we don’t really have very good histories of that because there are not many observational data sets or historical records for the tropics.”

During the years designated El Niño – when sea surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific are anomalously warm – trade winds weaken and cause less rainfall to occur in the Amazon Basin, said Weber. “And if there’s less precipitation, the isotopes are going to fractionate differently than normal,” he said. 

It’s well known that temperature and precipitation amount are major factors that affect the size of glaciers, Weber said. But, over the past 60 years, temperatures have been rising significantly, pushing the ice on Nevado Huascarán into an accelerated retreat. 

This is devastating news, said Lonnie Thompson, co-author of the study and a senior research scientist at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center, considering that tropical ice core samples can act as important proxies for understanding Earth’s intricate ocean-atmosphere system.

“The beauty of these ice cores is that they give you a perspective into what the natural variability was before humans started altering the climate system,” said Thompson, who is also a distinguished university professor of earth sciences. 

Yet for decades, due to the risk of avalanches and hidden snow-lined crevasses, no research expedition had ever been able to reach the peak of Nevado Huascarán to collect these ancient records. That is, until July of 2019, when Thompson and his team successfully navigated their way to the summit of the mountain’s South Peak. The team recovered two ice cores to bedrock from the col drill site – which is 6,050 meters above sea level – and two cores to bedrock from the summit at 6,768 meters above sea level – recovering 471 meters of glacial ice cores in total. 

“It’s a very difficult and dangerous place to recover ice cores and that expedition probably won’t be repeated,” said Thompson. “This paper is the first research to be published of what I believe will be a whole series of papers on what are probably the most unique collection of ice cores collected in my entire career.”

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation. Other co-authors were Mary Davis, Ellen Mosley-Thompson, Emilie Beaudon, Don Kenny, Ping-Nan Lin and Roxana Sierra-Hernández, all of Ohio State’s Byrd Polar & Climate Research Center. 

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.  

The research, recently published in the Journal of Glaciology, is the first large-scale study of its kind to compare ice shelf thickness data from ice-penetrating radar measurements to thickness data estimated from contemporary surface elevation measurements.

By juxtaposing vast datasets of 20 of the 300 total separate ice shelf systems that surround about 75% of the Antarctic ice sheet, researchers from The Ohio State University found that on average, the Antarctic ice shelves are nearly 6% thinner than previous studies had assumed, a difference of about 17 meters. This may seem like a small shift in scale, but typical ice shelves can be anywhere from 50 to 600 meters thick. 

The study concludes that while prior assumptions about the ice shelves’ thickness were correct on a large scale, their accuracy varied greatly on a small scale, such as for individual structures like valleys or crevasses that are either too narrow or too small to be measured accurately. 

Yet as ice shelves play a large role in stabilizing the Antarctic ice sheet as well as Earth’s complex climate system, getting an accurate estimation of their size is essential for calculating how their melt could contribute to sea level rise, said Allison Chartrand, lead author of the study and recent doctoral graduate of the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center. 

“Because the Antarctic ice sheet is so big, a 1% misestimation in how fast it’s melting could mean inches or feet of sea level rise that we’re not accounting for,” she said. “So it’s really important to be as accurate as we can.”

Even the most minute changes to Antarctica’s ice shelves could pose a significant threat to coastal communities, Chartrand said, as a few inches of significantly displaced ice shelf could cause thicker ice to flow into the ocean and potentially cause some coastlines to retreat several feet.  

According to Chartrand, she and her co-author, Ian Howat, a glaciologist and a Distinguished University Scholar in earth sciences at Ohio State, first began to investigate ice shelf thickness when examining basal channels – channels in which warmer ocean water melts grooves into the bottom of the ice shelf, accelerating mass loss – during a previous study.

One of the largest discrepancies the study found was that the assumptions used to estimate ice shelf thickness in previous research sometimes exaggerated ice shelf thickness in some areas, and at other times understated it. 

While many of these inconsistencies don’t take away much from the big picture, individually, these snapshots are vastly out of focus, said Chartrand. “In comparing the thickness estimate with the radar estimate, we saw that the numbers we had on basal channels and other features like them could be different by up to hundreds of meters, which meant that we could potentially be underestimating or overestimating rates of change,” she said. 

Overall, the study concludes that more abundant and accurate data is needed to enable better predictions of ice shelf loss in Antarctica, as the ultimate goal of their work is to improve observations of the processes that contribute to sea level rise, said Chartrand. 

“What this research really shows is that we need to be a lot more careful about the assumptions we make to estimate the ice shelf thickness, and about how we account for uncertainties and what they mean for the final result,” she said. 

While their work also seeks to inspire others to probe into older datasets, Chartrand hopes that using the past to study the future changes in our environment spurs the development of more advanced technologies, ones that might be able to offer greater aid in the task of assessing the ups and downs of Antarctica’s ever-shifting landscape.

“There’s potential for new discoveries even with data collected anywhere from two to 15 years ago, so we know that a lot still hasn’t been fully explored,” said Chartrand. 

This study was supported by NASA and the National Science Foundation.

Led by researchers at The Ohio State University, a team found that between 2018 and 2021, Steenstrup Glacier in Greenland has retreated about 5 miles, thinned about 20%, doubled in the amount of ice it discharges into the ocean, and quadrupled in velocity. According to the study, such a rapid change is so extraordinary among Greenland ice formations that it now places Steenstrup in the top 10% of glaciers that contribute to the entire region’s total ice discharge.

The study was published today in Nature Communications.

The Steenstrup Glacier is part of The Greenland Ice Sheet, a body of ice that covers nearly 80% of the world’s largest island, which is also the single largest contributor to global sea rise from the cryosphere, the portion of Earth’s ecosystem that includes all of its frozen water. While the region plays a crucial part in balancing the global climate system, the area is steadily shrinking as it sheds hundreds of billions of tons of ice each year because of global warming.  

Over the past few decades, much of this loss has been attributed to accelerated ice discharge from tidewater glaciers, glaciers that make contact with the ocean. Many glaciologists believe that this recent uptick in ice discharge can be explained by the intrusion of warming waters that are being swept from the Atlantic into Greenlandic fjords – critical oceanic gateways that can impact the stability of local glaciers and the health of polar ecosystems. 

The research team aimed to test that theory by examining a glacier in the southeastern region of Greenland called K.I.V Steenstrups Nordre Bræ, an entity more colloquially known as the Steenstrup Glacier.

“Up until 2016, there was nothing to suggest Steenstrup was in any way interesting,” said Thomas Chudley, lead author of the study, who completed this work as a research associate at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center. Chudley is now a Leverhulme research fellow at Durham University in the UK.

“There were plenty of other glaciers in Greenland that had retreated dramatically since the 1990s and increased their contribution to sea level rise, but this really wasn’t one of them.”

As far as scientists knew, Steenstrup had not only been stable for decades but was generally insensitive to the rising temperatures that had destabilized so many other regional glaciers, likely because of its isolated position in shallow waters. 

It wasn’t until Chudley and his colleagues compiled observational and modeling data from previous remote sensing analyses on the glacier that the team realized Steenstrup was likely experiencing melt due to anomalies in deeper Atlantic water. 

“Our current working hypothesis is that ocean temperatures have forced this retreat,” Chudley said. “The fact that the glacier’s velocity has quadrupled in just a few years opens up new questions about how fast large ice masses can really respond to climate change.”

In recent years, glaciologists have been able to use satellite data to estimate the potential volume of glacial ice stored at the poles and how it might affect current sea levels. For instance, if the Greenland Ice Sheet were to melt, Earth’s sea levels could rise by nearly 25 feet. In contrast, if the ice sheet in Antarctica were to fall apart, it’s possible that oceans would rise by nearly 200 feet, Chudley said. 

While Greenland and Antarctica would take centuries to collapse completely, the global cryosphere has the potential to cause sea levels to rise about six feet this century if the West Antarctic Ice Sheet undergoes collapse.

As around 10% of the planet’s population lives in low-lying coastal zones, Chudley said that any significant rise in sea level can cause increased risk to low-lying islands and coastal communities from storm surges and tropical cyclones.   

In the United States, sea level rise poses a particular risk to coastal cities in places like Florida or Louisiana, Chudley said. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s too late to stop such a future from happening. If climate policies evolve rapidly, humans might have a chance at halting the worst of sea level rise, Chudley said.

Overall, Steenstrup’s unique behavior reveals that even long-term stable glaciers are susceptible to sudden and rapid retreat as warmer waters begin to intrude and influence new environments.

While the research says continued scientific observation of the Steenstrup Glacier should be a priority, it concludes other similar glaciers also deserve attention because of their potential to retreat due to warming waters.

Understanding more about these interactions could provide key insight into how glaciers thrive in other locations around the world and even become an indicator of how these environments might change in the future.

“What’s happening in Greenland right now is kind of the canary in the coal mine of what might happen in West Antarctica over the next few centuries,” Chudley said. “So it would be great to be able to get into the fjord with real on-the-ground observations and see how and why Steenstrup has changed.”

This work was supported by NASA. Other Ohio State co-authors were Ian M. Howat and Adelaide Negrete of the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center. Michalea D. King of the University of Washington was also a co-author.

Global steel production has been rising steadily for decades – and because steel has poor resistance to corrosion, part of that demand is to replace steel used in construction materials that have become corroded over time, in everything from bridges to automobiles. Reducing the amount of steel that needs to be replaced due to corrosion could have measurable effects on how much greenhouse gases are produced to make steel, said Gerald Frankel, co-author of the study and a professor in materials science and engineering at The Ohio State University,

Though previous studies have estimated the current economic cost of corrosion to be about 3 to 4% of a nation’s gross domestic product, this new study, led by Ohio State alum Mariano Iannuzzi, is the first to quantify the environmental impact associated with steel corrosion.

The study was recently published in the journal npj Materials Degradation. 

“Given society’s reliance on coal fuel, iron and steel production is one of the largest greenhouse gases emitters of any industry,” said Frankel. “But most of the costs associated with the industry actually stem from the energy that goes into creating steel, and that energy is lost as the steel reverts to rust, which is similar to its original form of iron ore.” 

The time it takes steel to corrode largely depends on the severity of the environment and the alloy composition, but this environmentally expensive issue is only getting worse, said Frankel.

Using historical carbon dioxide intensity data to estimate carbon dioxide levels per year beginning from 1960, the researchers found that in 2021, steel production accounted for 27% of the carbon emissions of the global manufacturing sector, and about 10.5% of the total global carbon emissions worldwide. Corroded steel replacement accounted for about 1.6 to 3.4% of emissions.

But there is some good news, the study noted. Due to regulations placed on the steel industry, technological advances in the steelmaking process have resulted in a 61% reduction in energy consumption over the last 50 years.

Despite this improvement, the results of the study are a call to action for policymakers and industry officials to amend and coordinate international policy regarding steel production and corrosion management, Frankel said.

“Coordinated international strategies, as well as decreasing global steel demand, by using best practices for corrosion mitigation, could better improve global corrosion management strategies and drastically reduce the rise in greenhouse gas emissions we’re seeing due to repeatedly replacing corroded steel,” he said. 

If actions to improve steel’s carbon footprint aren’t taken soon, the study notes that greenhouse gas emissions produced by the steel industry could reach about 27.5% of the world’s total carbon emissions by 2030, with corroded steel representing about 4 to 9% of that number. Such a result would make the goals set by the Paris Agreement to limit Earth’s warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius as well as the U.S.’s own domestic climate goals almost completely unfeasible. The study notes that management strategies such as taking advantage of machine learning technologies could be one of the best chances we have to reduce Earth’s carbon dioxide levels. 

That said, if humans cannot meet these conditions, the consequences for Earth’s climate will be dire, so more people need to be made aware that a low-carbon steel industry is needed to prevent such a dystopia, said Frankel.

“Global warming is a societal challenge that takes coordination of a lot of multidisciplinary approaches,” said Frankel. “Our work is bringing to light an issue that seems to have gone under the radar in terms of the importance of adding to the problem.”

Over the last few decades, rising global temperatures have caused many natural phenomena like hurricanes, snowstorms, floods and wildfires to grow in intensity and frequency. 

While humans can’t prevent these disasters from occurring, the rapidly increasing number of satellites that orbit the Earth from space offers a greater opportunity to monitor their evolution, said C.K Shum, co-author of the study and a professor at the Byrd Polar Research Center and in earth sciences at The Ohio State University. He said that potentially allowing people in the area to make informed decisions could improve the effectiveness of local disaster response and management. 

“Predicting the future is a pretty difficult task, but by using remote sensing and machine learning, our research aims to help create a system that will be able to monitor these climate-induced hazards in a manner that enables a timely and informed disaster response,” said Shum. 

Shum’s research uses geodesy — the science of measuring the planet’s size, shape and orientation in space — to study phenomena related to global climate change. 

Using geodetic data gathered from various space agency satellites, researchers conducted several case studies to test whether a mix of remote sensing and deep machine learning analytics could accurately monitor abrupt weather episodes, including floods, droughts and storm surges in some areas of the world. 

In one experiment, the team used these methods to determine if radar signals from Earth’s Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), which were reflected over the ocean and received by GNSS receivers located at towns offshore in the Gulf of Mexico, could be used to track hurricane evolution by measuring rising sea levels after landfall. Between 2020 and 2021, the team studied how seven storms, such as Hurricane Hana and Hurricane Delta, affected coastal sea levels before they made landfall in the Gulf of Mexico. By monitoring these complex changes, they found a positive correlation between higher sea levels and how intense the storm surges were.

The data they used was collected by NASA and the German Aerospace Center’s Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission, and its successor, GRACE Follow-On. Both satellites have been used to monitor changes in Earth’s mass over the past two decades, but so far, have only been able to view the planet from a little more than 400 miles up. But using deep machine learning analytics, Shum’s team was able to reduce this resolution to about 15 miles, effectively improving society’s ability to monitor natural hazards. 

“Taking advantage of deep machine learning means having to condition the algorithm to continuously learn from various data inputs to achieve the goal you want to accomplish,” Shum said. In this instance, satellites allowed researchers to quantify the path and evolution of two Category 4 Atlantic hurricane-induced storm surges during their landfalls over Texas and Louisiana, Hurricane Harvey in August 2017 and Hurricane Laura in August 2020, respectively.

Accurate measurements of these natural hazards could one day help improve hurricane forecasting, said Shum. But in the short term, Shum would like to see countries and organizations make their satellite data more readily available to scientists, as projects that rely on deep machine learning often need large amounts of wide-ranging data to help make accurate forecasts.   

“Many of these novel satellite techniques require time and effort to process massive amounts of accurate data,” said Shum. “If researchers have access to more resources, we’ll be able to potentially develop technologies to better prepare people to adapt, as well as allow disaster management agencies to improve their response to intense and frequent climate-induced natural hazards.”

Co-authors of the project were Yu Zhang, Yuanyuan Jia, Yihang Ding and Junyi Guo of Ohio State; Orhan Akyilmaz and Metehan Uz of Istanbul Technical University; and Kazim Atman of Queen Mary University of London. This work was supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Türkiye (TÜBİTAK).

Their findings suggest that the dust composition in samples collected from different areas and depths of the same glacier can vary greatly, a discovery that hints that a complete dust record could offer up more secrets than scientists realize. 

Dust stirred up by strong winds can cause a host of chain reactions in the atmosphere, affecting everything from human health and marine biochemistry to the balance of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. How these microparticles affect the surrounding atmosphere is largely dependent on their size, shape and chemical makeup. 

In a new study, recently published in the Journal Geosciences, researchers worked to help understand how dust affects climate – and is affected by it – through examining dust particles locked inside ancient ice, or what Emilie Beaudon, co-author of the study and a senior research associate at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center, calls ‘cryo-dust.’ 

“By looking at dust composition through the ice, we can extract information about Earth’s environmental condition at the time the snow was deposited and the ice was formed,” she said. “We might be able to learn if it was a relatively dry or wet period or try to infer where the dust originally came from, and thereby obtain information on past atmospheric influences.”

But researchers need a lot of ice to be able to collect that data.

Ice cores, cylinders of ice drilled from glaciers and ice caps, have long been used as comprehensive archives of Earth’s climate system because of how well-preserved they are. As layers of ice accumulate over seasons and years, aerosols accumulate within each new coating, eventually providing researchers with very detailed records of the planet’s tumultuous climate history. With the help of these natural time capsules, scientists can learn about what the world looked like at the time, including aspects like greenhouse gas concentrations, as well as volcanic, solar and biological activity. =

The ice researchers used in this study was collected from the Guliya Ice Cap in Northwestern Tibet, an area home to one of the largest atmospheric dust source regions in the Northern Hemisphere, second only to the Sahara Desert. Because the region is under the influence of westerly winds, much of the dust that it picks up gets blown toward big cities in East Asia, Beaudon said. For instance, in 2021, China experienced its largest dust storm in a decade as the storm forced entire cities to take shelter, eventually raising concerns from the scientific community about the effects climate change is having on the frequency and intensity of such events. 

But scientists don’t have enough data to help identify how Central Asian desert dust is transported over long distances, nor how it changes over time. Studying a dust record from a Tibetan ice core is one of the only ways to provide a long-term perspective on the Central Asian dust cycle, Beaudon said. 

In 2015, a team of researchers from the United States and China helped drill for ice cores from different locations at the Guliya ice cap, before shipping these cores back to the lab at Ohio State. Beaudon’s team analyzed two of the ice cores, investigating the area’s dust record by studying microparticles collected on filters from melted ice, as well as those trapped in typical ice subsamples. Beaudon noticed that the encased dust wasn’t uniform; instead, each deposit was an unlikely array of different colors, sizes and layers.

“That’s how the idea of trying to determine where the dust was coming from emerged because there were already so many visual cues that highlighted their differences,” Beaudon said. 

Beaudon’s team also sought to discern whether most of the particles present in the ice came from the Taklimakan desert near the Guliya ice cap, or if it was carried there from other far-away locations.

“What we wanted to prove with these preliminary samples is that there is actual variability in their geochemistry and mineralogy,” she said. “We found that it’s not all the same dust coming from the same desert, and even in the same glacier, you don’t always have the same material.”

Overall, the study notes that the particularly old Guliya glacial dust archive is a prime candidate for deeper exploration, suggesting that in using additional ice core samples to develop higher-resolution dust records, Beaudon’s work opens up many research avenues, including studying the microbial populations that exist inside the ice and feed on the nutrients cryo-dust carries within it. 

Eventually, Beaudon envisions her work helping to investigate the glacial records of planets beyond Earth. “My goal is to acquire a lot of expertise in cryo-dust,” she said. “If there are ever ice cores drilled or samples taken from Mars or any other planet, I hope to study them.” 

Other Ohio State co-authors were Julia Sheets, Roxana Sierra-Hernández, Ellen Mosley-Thompson and Lonnie G. Thompson. Ellen Martin of the University of Florida also collaborated. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation.

The study, recently published in the Journal Nature Communications, finds that elevated carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have increased wood volume – or the biomass – of forests in the United States.

Although other factors like climate and pests can somewhat affect a tree’s volume, the study found that elevated carbon levels consistently led to an increase of wood volume in 10 different temperate forest groups across the country. This suggests that trees are helping to shield Earth’s ecosystem from the impacts of global warming through their rapid growth.

“Forests are taking carbon out of the atmosphere at a rate of about 13% of our gross emissions,” said Brent Sohngen, co-author of the study and professor of environmental and resource economics at The Ohio State University. “While we’re putting billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we’re actually taking much of it out just by letting our forests grow.”

This phenomenon is called carbon fertilization: An influx of carbon dioxide increases a plant’s rate of photosynthesis, which combines energy from the sun, water, and nutrients from the ground and air to produce fuel for life and spurs plant growth.

“It’s well known that when you put a ton of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, it doesn’t stay up there forever,” Sohngen said. “A massive amount of it falls into the oceans, while the rest of it is taken up by trees and wetlands and those kinds of areas.”

Over the last two decades, forests in the United States have sequestered about 700-800 million tonnes of carbon dioxide per year, which, according to the study, accounts for roughly 10% to 11% of the country’s total carbon dioxide emissions. While exposure to high levels of carbon dioxide can have ill effects on natural systems and infrastructure, trees have no issue gluttoning themselves on Earth’s extra supply of the greenhouse gas.

To put it in perspective, if you imagine a tree as just a huge cylinder, the added volume the study finds essentially amounts to an extra tree ring, Sohngen said. Although such growth may not be noticeable to the average person, compared to the trees of 30 years ago, modern vegetation is about 20% to 30% bigger than it used to be. If applied to the Coast Redwood forests – home to some of the largest trees in the world – even a modest percentage increase means a lot of additional carbon storage in forests. Researchers also found that even older large trees continue adding biomass as they age due to elevated carbon dioxide levels.

Unlike the effects of climate change, which varies over location and in time, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere mixes almost evenly, so every place on Earth has nearly the same amount, Sohngen said.

So to test whether the chemical compound was responsible for beefing up our biome, Sohngen’s team used historical data from the U.S. Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis Program (USFS-FIA) to compare how the wood volume of certain forest groups has changed over the past few decades. The study estimates that between 1970 and 2015, there was a significant increase in trees’ wood volume, which correlates with a distinct rise in carbon emissions.

Researchers were also able to use this method to test whether there were differences in naturally occurring trees versus trees that were planted. Sohngen thought that planted trees would undergo a bigger fertilization effect, as they have an advantage in that planters often pick the best seeds to plant in only the best locations. On the contrary, he was surprised to find that planted trees respond to carbon dioxide levels in the same way natural ones do.

Overall, Sohngen said this work shows that the wood volume response to carbon dioxide in our ecosystem is even higher than his colleagues predicted with experimental studies. 

The results should show policymakers and others the value of trees in mitigating climate change. Sohngen said that carbon fertilization could one day make tree-growing efforts more efficient. For instance, if it costs $50 to plant one acre of trees today, with the help of carbon fertilization, that number could easily be decreased to $40. As climate change costs the United States about $2 trillion each year, that decrease could help drive down the cost of mitigating climate change, Sohngen said.

“Carbon fertilization certainly makes it cheaper to plant trees, avoid deforestation, or do other activities related to trying to enhance the carbon sink in forests,” Sohngen said. “We should be planting more trees and preserving older ones, because at the end of the day they’re probably our best bet for mitigating climate change.”

The study was led by Eric Davis, a Ph.D graduate of Ohio State’s agricultural, environmental, and development economics program. This research was supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Nicknamed “The Third Pole,” the Tibetan Plateau and neighboring Himalayas is home to the largest global store of frozen water outside of the North and South Polar Regions. This region, also known as the Asian water tower (AWT), functions as a complex water distribution system which delivers life-giving liquid to multiple countries, including parts of China,  India, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. 

Yet due to the rapid melting of snow and upstream glaciers, the area can’t sustainably support the continued growth of the developing nations that rely on it.

“Populations are growing so rapidly, and so is the water demand,” said Lonnie Thompson, distinguished university professor of earth sciences at The Ohio State University and senior research scientist at the Byrd Polar Research Center. “These problems can lead to increased risks of international and even intranational disputes, and in the past, they have.” 

Thompson, who has studied climate change for nearly five decades, is intimately familiar with the precarious nature of the region’s hydrological situation. In 1984, Thompson became a member of the first Western team sent to investigate the glaciers in China and Tibet. Since then, he and a team of international colleagues have spent years investigating ice core-derived climate records and the area’s rapidly receding ice along with the impact it’s had on the local settlements that depend on the AWT for their freshwater needs.

The team’s latest paper, of which Thompson is a co-author, was published in the journal Nature Reviews Earth and Environment. Using temperature change data from 1980 to 2018 to track regional warming, their findings revealed that the AWT’s overall temperature has increased at about 0.42 degrees Celsius per decade, about twice the global average rate.

“This has huge implications for the glaciers, particularly those in the Himalayas,” Thompson said. “Overall, we’re losing water off the plateau, about 50% more water than we’re gaining.” This scarcity is causing an alarming water imbalance: Northern parts of Tibet often experience an overabundance of water resources as more precipitation occurs due to the strengthening westerlies, while southern river basins and water supplies shrink as drought and rising temperatures contribute to water loss downstream. 

According to the study, because many vulnerable societies border these downstream basins, this worsening disparity could heighten conflicts or exacerbate already tense situations between countries that share these river basins, like the long-term irrigation and water struggles between India and Pakistan.

“The way that regional climate varies, there are winners and losers,” Thompson said. “But we have to learn to work together in order to ensure adequate and equitable water supplies throughout this region.” As local temperatures continue to rise and water resources become depleted, more people will end up facing ever diminishing water supplies, he said.

Still, overall increases in precipitation alone won’t meet the increased water demands of downstream regions and countries.

To combat this, the study recommends using more comprehensive water monitoring systems in data-scarce areas, noting that better atmospheric and hydrologic models are needed to help predict what’s happening to the region’s water supply. Lawmakers should then use those observations to help develop actionable policies for sustainable water management, Thompson said. If policymakers do decide to listen to the scientists' counsel, these new policies could be used to develop adaptation measures for the AWT through collaboration between upstream and downstream countries.

After all, when things go awry in one area of the world, like the butterfly effect, they tend to have long-lasting effects on the rest of Earth’s population. “Climate change is a global process,” Thompson said. “It doesn't matter what country or what part of the world you come from. Sooner or later, you’ll have a similar problem.”