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. 

The result of a global buildup in plastic pollution, microplastics and nanoplastics are small synthetic particles produced when plastic products are used or degrade. These plastic fragments are found nearly everywhere in the environment, including the nation’s waterways. 

To better understand the concentration levels in a segment of the U.S. water supply, scientists analyzed water samples from four treatment plants near Lake Erie and six different brands of bottled water. Their results showed that bottled water contained three times as many nanoplastic particles as the treated drinking water, said Megan Jamison Hart, lead author of the study and a PhD candidate in environmental sciences at The Ohio State University.

“We can make educated choices to try and reduce our daily exposure to these harmful chemicals,” said Hart. “For the average person who is thirsty and wants a drink, the best way to do that would be drinking it straight out of the tap rather than grabbing pre-bottled water.”

While previous research evaluated the presence of microplastics in different drinking water sources few have centered on nanoplastics, likely because their extremely small size makes them a challenge to study, said Hart. Using a combination of imaging (scanning electron microscopy) and chemical identification (optical photothermal infrared spectroscopy) techniques allowed the team to detect and identify particles down to their smallest parts.

The study was recently published in the journal Science of The Total Environment. 

Although the extent of microplastics’ effect on human health is still unclear, many experts suggest their presence may be detrimental to our well-being in the long term, as smaller plastic pieces, called nanoplastics, are more likely to cross vital biological barriers in the body. 

“While we don’t really fully understand the human health risks associated with nanoplastic exposure, it’s still better to try and mitigate that risk because evidence indicates that they do cause problems, even if we’re not fully aware of what those are yet,” said Hart. 

During their experiments, researchers found that the most common plastics in the bottled water came from the bottled water packaging, which they expected, but the source of the plastics in the drinking water is still unclear. Over 50% of all the particles detected were nanoplastics, demonstrating how pervasive these tiny chemicals can be, even in drinking water.

These details confirm that nanoplastics are a significant component of the world’s overall amount of microplastic contamination and scientists likely underestimate the true scope of their environmental threat, said John Lenhart, senior author of the study and a professor of environmental engineering at Ohio State.

“The concentrations we saw were higher than anticipated, which, unlike prior studies, we were able to attribute to the inclusion of the nanoplastics,” said Lenhart. “That emphasis validates a lot of the information we’ve learned.”

Incorporating nanoplastics into this study’s measurements may lead to additional insights down the line, including whether the team’s analytical techniques could also be utilized to evaluate which treatment processes work best at removing these silent invaders from the environment. 

“By understanding the basic composition of the materials in water and the reactions important for controlling that composition, we can make better design decisions for future treatment or for remediation,” said Lenhart. “That’s why analyses like these are so promising.”

The study was supported by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration through its Ohio Sea Grant College Program and the National Science Foundation.  

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. 

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. 

As more than 2 billion people around the world are estimated to lack access to clean drinking water, improving conventional ways to collect such a valuable resource would make it significantly more attainable for water-scarce regions, said John LaRocco, lead author of the study and a research scientist in psychiatry at The Ohio State University College of Medicine. 

“You can survive three minutes without air, three weeks without food, but only three days without water,” said LaRocco. “But with it, you can begin to solve a lot of problems, like national security, mental health or sanitation, just by improving the accessibility of clean drinking water.”

Whereas many existing water harvesting technologies are large, energy-intensive and slow, this team’s device is unique due to elastocaloric cooling, which uses materials that can reduce energy use, size and complexity. This design is what also allowed their prototype to become portable enough to fit inside a backpack, said LaRocco. 

Researchers compared their creation with a dehumidifier that operates using desiccant wheels, rotating cylinders lined with hydrophilic materials that work to trap and remove humidity from the surrounding airflow. They tested the performance of each device in sessions of 30 minutes each, evaluating their energy consumption, heat generation and water-harvesting efficiency.

The study was recently published in the journal Technologies.

The trial’s results revealed significant differences in power consumption and highlighted what conditions their prototype might be best suited for. For example, said John Simonis, co-author of the study and an undergraduate student in electrical and computer engineering, the humidity level of the region where their device is used could influence the effectiveness of its water collection capabilities. 

“Compared to the traditional desiccant wheel system, our system has the ability to scale more dynamically to fit the needs of the environment,” said Simonis. “Because our device is more modular, there’s room for a lot of adaptability.”

The authors noted that places like the Philippines, Indonesia, Haiti, and even Ohio are a few of the places where the standard humidity would fall just right enough for their prototype to achieve maximum efficiency. 

The water produced from their device is readily drinkable, said Simonis, but because their device is also made with 3D printed materials that can degrade over time, must be heavily filtered to limit the amount of microplastics someone could ingest if they drank it immediately. 

According to statistics provided by the United Nations, only about 0.5% of Earth’s water is freshwater and safe for human consumption. Environmental changes caused by war, pollution and climate change also remain risk factors for an ongoing global water crisis. 

Because natural disasters and international emergencies will continue to exacerbate these issues, it’s imperative to find ways to creatively harvest water to support marginalized populations, said Qudsia Tahmina, co-author of the study and associate professor of practice in electrical and computer engineering.

That said, being able to ensure consistency of devices that can harvest a renewable resource out of thin air will help make the process both more economical and more feasible, the study notes. It’s a goal that if achieved, will impact every facet of life on Earth, said LaRocco. 

“We’re hoping that clean water for the rest of the world isn’t just a pipe dream,” he said. 

Using the team’s models, it is possible for the public to experiment with creating a dehumidifier of their own. But while their prototype is as of now meant for individual use, in the future, it could be easily optimized to care for the needs of a household or larger community, said Simonis. 

“It is possible to develop an incredibly large version of our prototype,” he said. “It could extract as much water in a limited amount of time and get the same energy efficiency as somebody who may have a smaller device who’s running theirs continuously.”

Vidhaath Vedati of Ohio State was also a co-author. 

The study identified a secure way to attach chemical additives to polyvinyl chloride (PVC). 

Found in everything from toys, construction supplies and medical packaging, PVC plastics currently rank third among the most used plastics worldwide. Despite its widespread use, pure PVC is brittle and sensitive to heat, and manufacturers can only utilize it after stabilizing its properties with other chemicals. 

However, these additives, or plasticizers, are only a short-term fix for stabilizing PVC. Over time, plasticizers leach from the plastics, which allows the material to deteriorate into potentially hazardous organics and microplastics. Now, a team led by Christo Sevov, the principal investigator of the study and an associate professor in chemistry and biochemistry at The Ohio State University, found that using electricity to permanently affix those chemical additives can prevent such unwanted reactions.

“Instead of mixing in those chemicals, our method involves chemically bonding the plasticizer compound directly to PVC by grafting them onto the backbone of the polymer,” said Sevov.

Altering PVC molecules in this way allows for them to become more durable and resistant to chemical changes, eventually leading to materials with more robust properties. 

“This is really one of the few examples that we have where there’s this much control over changing the properties of PVC,” said Sevov. “So this is the first step in controllably modifying PVC to give it properties you’re interested in, whether it’s hard, stretchy or soft.”

The team did run into some challenges; synthetic polymer modifications often fail because the reactions were originally developed for small-molecule analogs, not big-molecule analogs such as pure PVC. To solve this, researchers optimized the catalyst they used in their process, and through trial and error, were able to overcome the issues that arise when editing big molecules. 

The study was recently published in the journal Chem. 

Outside of making leaps in organic chemistry, the team’s work also has implications for the environment, as putting a cap on how quickly plastics degrade can do much to curb the release of microplastics — tiny pieces of plastic debris — into our surroundings. 

Today, scientists know that these particles, which have been found to pollute the air, water and our food supply, are harmful both to humans and wildlife. The average person likely ingests between 78,000 and 211,000 of these particles every year. 

But as experts are beginning to understand the long-term impact microplastics have on Earth, organic chemists are racing to find ways to phase them out of everyday life, said Sevov. 

“Many chemists are shifting their efforts to studying big molecules and developing new chemistries for upcycling, recycling and modifying well-known polymers,” he said. For example, trying to recycle PVC products can cause further degradation to the material due to the high temperatures it takes to convert plastic into something else, so the process isn’t very efficient. 

But using Sevov’s method, “You can potentially reuse the material many, many more times before it really begins to fall apart, improving its lifetime and reusability,” he said. 

In the future, more control over which materials will be safe for consumers will come once efforts to fix PVC leakage can be reliably scaled up, something that the study emphasizes that, at the moment, is possible with their method alone. 

“There’s no better way to do this on the scale you would need for commercial PVC modification because it is an immense process,” said Sevov. “There’s still a lot to play around with before we solve the microplastic situation, though now we’ve laid the groundwork for how to do it.”

Other Ohio State co-authors include Jordan L.S. Zackasee, Valmuri Srivardhan, Blaise L. Truesdell and Elizabeth J. Vrana. This work was supported by the Department of Energy’s Early Career Research Program.

The research, led by Jai Tiarks, a recent graduate alum in environment and natural resources at The Ohio State University, found that age was a deciding factor in whether fish could successfully cope with new conditions in their underwater environment.  

The study in the Blue Lips cichlid, a species native to swamps and lakes of Uganda, showed that the eyes and pupil size of young fish raised in cloudy water grew larger than those of fish raised in clear water. This phenomenon happened regardless of the environment each brood’s parents originated from. 

The study was recently published in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

Vision is a vital sense for many creatures, as being able to navigate their surroundings well gives them an edge when it comes to holding onto their spot in the food chain. But when an ecosystem is bombarded with new environmental stressors, most organisms in the animal kingdom have three ways they respond to the negative outcomes.

Those choices, said Tiarks, are to adapt, move to another location, or die out. 

“Cichlids are known for filling a huge diversity of different ecological niches and being able to adapt to changes in their environment,” they said. “That has driven a lot of interest from an evolutionary standpoint, especially for the timescale that this adaptation occurs.”

To learn more about how and when these adaptations occur, researchers raised half of a brood of fish in tanks with clear water and placed the other half in tanks with cloudy water. 

Researchers then measured the diameter of the eye and pupil of both the young fish and adult cichlids in the experiment, determining younger populations had indeed gained traits that allowed them to grow larger eye structures in response to cloudy waters. 

“When the cichlids were young, they had this huge plasticity and were able to alter their physiology in order to cope with the turbid environmental conditions,” Tiarks said. “But when we looked at the fish that were older, they didn’t have that same flexibility.”

The study also makes note of an overall difference in the pattern of eye and brain sizes between young and old fish. Originally, the team expected to find that fish reared in murky water would exhibit larger brains than those reared in clear water, since having bigger eyes doesn’t mean much if the brain doesn’t evolve to process that visual information.

Instead, digital photographs of their biological systems revealed that older fish had bigger brains and optic lobes relative to their length and brain mass compared to the relative sizes of those structures in younger fish. This could indicate that similar to mammals, fish experience different sensory demands at various stages throughout their lives. 

It’s still unclear if many of these changes are brought on by outside environmental variables like the amount of oxygen in the water or physical changes, like sexual maturation. 

The issue of growing up in clear versus murky water is a real one for the Blue Lips cichlid, especially with changing ecosystems in their African habitat.

Deforestation is one of the leading causes of rising habitat destruction and murkiness in rivers and lakes. When trees are cut down, the stability of the nearby soil is uprooted, leading to deposit of sediment into nearby aquatic systems, said Tiarks. 

“Anytime there’s a storm, all of that soil, sediment and vegetation that was held in place by trees isn’t held in place anymore,” they said. “It all ends up in whatever body of water is nearest, and it’s a direct stressor to our field sites and the populations that live there.”

Studies like this one suggest that as human-induced environmental change continues to worsen, certain animal populations like fish may be able to persist even in less-than-ideal habitats. 

To Tiarks, this phenomenon offers some measure of hope that humans’ negative influence on the environment isn’t as life-altering for all species as it currently seems. 

“We are causing and driving changes within these fishes’ systems,” said Tiarks. “But holding on to examples of species that can actually cope with the changes happening around them is a good reminder of how powerful and flexible nature is.”

Suzanne M. Gray from Ohio State and Lauren J. Chapman from McGill University were co-authors. 

While accelerating sea level rise will result in widespread intermittent flooding and long-term inundation in many coastal communities, the paper, recently published in Nature Communications, showed that when these levels increase above 4 feet, minority populations will be disproportionately at risk of isolation.

Rising sea levels could lead to isolation by disrupting transportation networks and roads, meaning that those affected lose access to essential locations such as critical emergency services and schools. 

The study further exposed that renters and older adults face a greater risk of isolation, highlighting the growing connection between historical drivers of existing social inequality and the groups that incur the most risk of climate change.

According to Kelsea Best, lead author of the study and an assistant professor of civil, environmental and geodetic engineering at The Ohio State University, the first step in better characterizing these threats is changing how researchers assess community risk, as most studies measure this by exclusively determining impacts via direct flooding. But concentrating on this sole measurement neglects more complex aftereffects of sea level rise, such as isolation, and reinforces inequality in coastal areas, Best said. 

“We need to re-conceptualize how we measure who is burdened by sea level rise because there are so many ways that people might be burdened before their home is flooded,“ she said. 

Current reports estimate that around 20 million coastal residents in the U.S. will be affected by rising sea levels by 2030, but the paper notes that this number doesn’t include the whole impact global warming will have on certain communities and demographics. 

Notably, because people need access to essential places like grocery stores, public schools, hospitals and fire stations, Best and her colleagues argue that an inability to reach these places impacts individuals just as negatively as if they were living in inundated homes themselves, and should be documented as such. 

Most importantly, their results expose one of the main reasons for these vast differences in risk: A group’s risk of isolation is intimately entwined with specific road networks and where vital services are located in relation to where affected individuals reside. 

They identified these disparities in risk by overlaying OpenStreetMap (OSM) road network data with National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) mean higher high water (MHHW) scenarios. These projections were then combined with recent census data to estimate the percentage of a population that would be left out or missed in estimates of who would be impacted by sea level rise if researchers only counted those who suffered direct inundation. 

“If we take a one-size-fits-all approach, or a seemingly ‘neutral’ approach to understanding who gets access to safe, affordable housing and community in a world with climate change, then we’re really just exacerbating these inequities and it’s not good enough,” said Best. “We have to deliberately seek to provide access to adaptation resources to groups of people who have historically been left out and therefore have fewer resources to respond in the first place.”

The researchers showed that Hispanic populations are often overrepresented in the total citizenry for being at risk of isolation beginning at 4 feet of sea level rise, and Black populations are overrepresented after 6 feet. Alternatively, white populations are underrepresented after 5 feet of sea level rise. 

But to determine when these disparities will begin to develop, Best’s team compared two long-term sea level rise scenarios: an intermediate scenario in which global sea level rise increased by a meter by 2100, and a high scenario in which that number increased to 2 meters by the same year. 

Alarmingly, the study found strong evidence that these isolation effects would set in by 2120 in the intermediate scenario and as early as 2090 in the high scenario. “This timeline matters from a planning and adaptation perspective,” said Best. “Part of why we included the temporal piece is to say this issue would not be as much of a problem if we had urgent, aggressive mitigation. 

“The effects of climate change are going to be further reaching and more cascading than might be directly obvious, and those effects are not going to be felt equitably,” said Best. “So we need to be thinking about those populations most at risk from the beginning and develop policies to support them.” 

The work was supported by the Clark Distinguished Chair Endowment (given to study co-author Deb. A. Neimeier of the University of Maryland) and the National Science Foundation. Other co-authors were Qian He from Rowan University, Allison C. Reilly from the University of Maryland, and Mitchell Anderson and Tom Logan from the University of Canterbury. 

Led by scientists at The Ohio State University, the study showed that oxygen-stable isotope records stored in tropical mountain glacier ice cores can be used to provide scientists with a distinct paleoclimate history of the planet’s middle and upper troposphere. By combining ice core proxy records, paleoclimate simulations and modern satellite measurements and comparing the results to those from previous climate models, they found that the temperature in this region of the atmosphere cooled by 7.35 degrees Celsius during the Earth’s glacial period, which for many researchers illuminates new theories about climate dynamics throughout the ages.  

“Typically, you need hundreds of pieces of data to construct a record of global mean temperature,” said Zhengyu Liu, lead author of the study and a professor of geography at The Ohio State University. “It turns out, in that region in the tropics and at that height, you can use just one, and it’s very consistent with many other independent constructions available, which rely primarily on sea surface temperature proxies.” 

Because the ice core, collected from Nevado Huascarán in Peru, was formed in a high-mountain region disconnected from the oceans, samples recovered there are essentially unique “Goldilocks-type” indicators of global mean temperature change. Unlike ice recovered from opposite extremes of the planet such as Greenland or Antarctica, ice from tropical regions provides a happy medium, and holds evidence that is “just right” for measuring Earth’s mean temperature throughout the ages. More importantly, said Liu, their findings show the first solely land-based estimate of global stage cooling, or how much Earth’s temperature decreased during its last glacial period.  

The study, which was published recently in Science Advances, and presented in a poster session today (Dec. 14, 2023) at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, found that surface temperatures during Earth’s glacial cooling stages diminished by as much as 5.9 degrees Celsius.  

“This ice core is like a weather tower quietly recording atmospheric history,” said Liu. According to the study, since the highest tropical ice records are not affected by regional features of the warming environment due to their unique elevation and location, the information these ‘weather towers’ collect is considered to be a more accurate measurement of surface global mean temperature as opposed to records that reflect regional changes.   

It’s for this reason that information gained from even a single tropical ice core could likely be used to enhance scientists’ understanding of a number of different climate elements, including temperature responses during periods of rapid climate change such as the one occurring today as well those likely to occur in the future, said Lonnie Thompson, co-author of the study and professor of earth sciences and a senior research scientist at the Byrd Polar and Climate Research Center. Potent greenhouse gases such as methane, large sources of which come from tropical wetlands, are also preserved in the bubbles in these very high-elevation ice cores where temperatures are very cold and no melting occurs. But by extracting the methane from the ice cores, scientists can construct a history of the changes in its atmospheric concentration. According to Thompson, as methane is a very potent greenhouse gas that can warm the atmosphere at alarming rates, it’s important to have a tropical archive of its past activity. 

“Integrating these tropical records with those from the polar regions provides a more global picture,” he said. “Thus, acquiring these high-elevation tropical climate histories is very important as their data will greatly advance our understanding of Earth’s climate on this planet.”  

The study’s conclusions also shed light on a decades-old scientific debate on how oxygen-stable isotopes in tropical ice cores can be used to interpret climate variations over time. Previous studies have debated whether tropical ice core samples serve as proxies for determining atmospheric changes through either temperature or precipitation processes. This study suggests the tropical ice cores serve as a recorder of air temperature in the mid-upper troposphere across tropics, and more interestingly, as a recorder of global mean surface temperature during Earth’s last glacial period. 

Altogether, the study aims to improve researchers’ understanding of paleoclimatology, as a better understanding of Earth’s climate patterns could help refine both future climate models and extreme weather predictions.  

Yuntao Bao, another co-author of the study and a PhD student in geography at Ohio State, said that their research wouldn’t have been possible without the input of colleagues across many other fields, not just those in the scientific community interested in studying ice cores.  

“The answer to your questions will not come to you the first time, but collaborating with others who have different backgrounds than our own improves our understanding of the world,” said Bao. “With more perspectives, our future work can reach further than it’s ever gone.” 

Other co-authors are Ellen Mosley-Thompson from Ohio State, Clay Tabor from the University of Connecticut, Guang J. Zhang from the University of California, San Diego, Mi Yan from Nanjing Normal University, Marcus Lofverstrom from the University of Arizona, Isabel Montanez from the University of California, Davis, and Jessica Oster from Vanderbilt University. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation. 

These deposits, known as megabeds, were found in the western Marsili Basin, an area at the bottom of the Tyrrhenian Sea that surrounds the Marsili Seamount, a large undersea volcano. 

By combining geophysical data acquired from a Spanish research project and data from sediment cores collected from a nearby Ocean Drilling program site, scientists were able to show that three deposits are made up of alternating beds of volcaniclastic sand and mud, while the fourth is a volcaniclastic debris flow, a more dense mixture of volcanic sediment and water. 

The study’s findings, published in the Journal Geology, suggest that these structures were deposited during a volatile time when the Campi Flegrei caldera and the Neapolitan Yellow Tuff supereruption were active. 

The new study suggests that these megabeds originated not from nearby volcanoes, but from a volcanic province to the north. That province, researchers think, was an area once near the Campanian Ignimbrite (CI) supereruption of Campi Flegrei, the largest one of its volcanic eruptions since the caldera’s formation nearly 50,000 years ago.

This still volcanically active region could pose immense danger in the future, said Derek Sawyer, lead author of the study and an associate professor of earth sciences at The Ohio State University. The discovery of these previously unknown megabeds is pivotal for understanding and measuring the impact of such recurring geohazards over time.

“Megabeds are important components of deep-sea basins and are thought to be the result of major catastrophic events,” he said. “So studying them can serve as an important archive into how these events affected the Earth.”

The CI supereruption was so violent an incident that it had a profound effect on the planet and had a hand in shaping Earth’s climate and ecosystems, as well as a huge chunk of human migratory and geologic history. Thanks to the huge amounts of dust and ash that were left behind on land and eventually traveled into the ocean, Sawyer and his team were able to discern the age and composition of the four sediment deposits, and determined that their interpretation that the megabeds originated from the Campi Flegrei caldera to the north is likely supported.

More evidence supporting the theory came from the researchers’ discovery that tiny marine microbes called benthic foraminifera that reside within these megabeds were found not to have originated from Marsili as previously assumed, but from the Campi Flegrei caldera.  

Though scientists can now better predict potential ruptures and other types of seismic hazards, recent volcanic and hydrothermal activity in the Mediterranean has raised scientists’ concerns over whether the Marsili Seamount, which rises 3,500 meters from the seafloor to a depth of 489 meters below sea level, will erupt soon. 

“This is the part of Italy, the Phlegrean Fields, where Mount Vesuvius is and it’s still a very volcanically active area, so it’s a known hazard and continuously monitored,” said Sawyer. “In doing marine geoscience studies like these, we’re working to help understand past eruption events to aid in the effort to build resilient communities that have as much information as they can in order to avoid getting displaced.”

If a volcano in this region were to erupt today, the movement of such vast magma deposits beneath the surface could trigger tsunamis threatening nearby coastal cities and cause a variety of other ecological disasters.

While the study did find that megabeds recur in the Marsili Basin about every 10,000 to 15,000 years, Sawyer said that because not every eruption creates a megabed, scientists should be vigilant in watching for events that don’t adhere to these timescales. As the last one is estimated to have happened about 2,100 to 3,000 years ago, there’s still some uncertainty regarding when the next one will occur. 

“We have to be cautious about these predictions, but in order to be prepared for it, more research is needed,” Sawyer said.

Other co-authors are Roger Urgeles and Claudio Lo Iacono, both of the Institute of Marine Sciences in Spain. This study was supported by the National Science Foundation, as well as the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, and Agencia Estatal de Investigación. 

“We brought it specifically because it’s a cool car,” said Ian Campbell, graduate research assistant for the EcoCAR Challenge Team at Ohio State. “One of our big things is youth outreach. We want to get youth, as well as underrepresented groups, involved in STEM. By bringing a cool car, we hope to get kids more interested in these activities.”

The activities Campbell mentions include the EcoCAR Challenge, which, through a partnership between General Motors, the United States Department of Energy and MathWorks, asks a handful of North American universities to take a stock car and work to improve the overall efficiency of the vehicle, while maintaining, if not increasing, the vehicle’s performance.

According to Campbell, in recent years, teams have sought to integrate autonomous capabilities – like self-driving and self-parking – as well.

The car currently on display at the fair is the EcoCAR 3, a 2015 Camaro. The vehicle was converted from a V8 stock engine to a four-cylinder engine with a high-voltage battery. By showing fairgoers the Camaro, the EcoCAR team hopes to educate the public about the automotive research happening at the university.

“It’s a good way to see what students are working on right now,” said Daniel Kerscher, a spring 2023 mechanical engineering graduate who is spending his summer working as an EcoCAR intern.

Touch-A-Truck isn’t the only place visitors can have Buckeye fun at the fair. A 20-foot-tall inflatable Brutus greets guests at the fair’s south entrance. The College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences (CFAES) supports the annual Dean’s Charity Steer Show on August 1.

The Land and Living exhibit uses interactive experiences to educate fairgoers about agriculture. And, as always, there are a variety of 4H competitions and events, many of which are supported by CFAES.

Events like the fair allow Buckeyes to share their hard work with the greater Ohio community.

“It’s a huge honor to represent the university,” Campbell said. “We try to get more people involved with programs like this.”

Having a car like the Camaro makes that easier, he added.

“It’s like my dad always told me: You can sell a young man’s car to an old man, but you can’t sell an old man’s car to a young man.”

For more information about the Ohio State Fair, please visit the fair website: https://www.ohiostatefair.com/.

Their findings showed that the unique oceanographic conditions in Florida’s Dry Tortugas National Park provided corals with an opportunity to flourish, enhancing both coral growth and survivorship while positively influencing the coral’s microbiome – the thousands of diverse microbes that are naturally associated with them. The research also indicates that restoration efforts for the species would be most successful in areas that exhibit higher food availability, or places rife with zooplankton, a key source of nutrition that aids in coral tissue building and repair.

Over the last few decades, marine disease, climate change and a number of other environmental stressors have caused the elkhorn coral (Acropora palmata) population – once a major engineer of the reef ecosystem in the Caribbean – to experience a dramatic decline. Although small patches of these corals are still found in the Caribbean, today the species appears to be functionally extinct in Florida, said Andréa Grottoli, senior author of the study and a professor of earth sciences at The Ohio State University. While there are coral colonies left, there aren’t enough of them to effectively reproduce. 

“In other parts of the Caribbean, there are little pockets where there are enough of them, but in general, elkhorn coral is a highly sensitive species,” said Grottoli. “It’s no longer the primary coral on the Florida and Caribbean reefs, and that’s a huge loss to that reef ecosystem function.”

In the Florida Keys, healthy coral reefs help minimize coastal erosion and contribute greatly to the region’s economic stability through federally managed fisheries and other tourism-based ventures, providing motivation for government agencies and scientists alike to find the best strategies for restoring the vital species. 

The study, published today in the journal Nature Communications Earth and Environment, describes how researchers aimed to do this by studying environmental variables that might contribute to the species’ survival. In 2018, researchers at the United States Geological Survey (USGS) placed replicated elkhorn colonies in five different locations along Florida’s offshore coral reef. After two years, Grottoli’s team sampled the coral’s physiology to compare how the colonies fared.

Grottoli’s team measured a number of physiological traits important to the coral’s survival, including biomass, fat content and various markers for coral feeding. 

Overall, the health profiles of the elkhorn coral greatly differed among the five areas, but only the coral samples in the Dry Tortugas thrived compared to all the other sites, said Grottoli, as certain biological traits indicated that the Dry Tortugas corals were eating more zooplankton.

The favorable conditions these corals experienced are likely due to the site’s propensity for periodic upwellings, a wind-driven oceanographic phenomenon that can bring bursts of nutrient-rich water up to the surface from colder, deeper waters. These events stimulate zooplankton production and bring large quantities of the food source into the region, making the area a veritable oasis for elkhorn coral.  

“These little pulses of extra food can make a big difference in coral survival and the things we measured are consistent with that interpretation,” said Grottoli. 

Grottoli said their research was challenged by early COVID-19 travel constraints and bad weather, but the results add to a growing body of evidence that the Dry Tortugas would be a logical place to attempt to restore elkhorn coral. The study notes that restoring elkhorn corals in the Dry Tortugas may also provide a source population for new coral recruits throughout the Florida Keys, but further research is needed to determine if other at-risk species of coral may also thrive there, Grottoli said. Still, it won’t solve all the issues facing endangered coral populations. 

“We’re trying to make smart conservation and restoration decisions, but at the core of this work is that coral reefs are declining because of climate change and local stressors like overfishing and pollution,” said Grottoli. “Until we address those two things, no matter how smart we are about coral restoration and conservation, we’re always just putting a band-aid on it.”

This work was supported by the U.S. Geological Survey’s Coastal and Marine Hazards and Resources Program and the National Science Foundation. Other Ohio State co-authors were Leila Chapron and Ann Marie Hulver, as well as Ilsa Kuffner, Lucy Bartlett, Anastasios Stathakopoulos and Erin Lyons from the U.S. Geological Survey, and Dustin Kemp and Elise Keister from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. 

Made by pyrolysis, a process that involves heating organic material in a low-oxygen environment, biochar – a charcoal-like, porous substance – has long been utilized for crop production as a soil amendment or carbon sequestration agent. In recent years,  researchers have seen a resurgence of heightened interest in the technology due to its unique physical structure and its various agricultural and environmental benefits.

It’s for these reasons that biochar’s potential to remove large amounts of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere deserves to be re-evaluated, said Raj Shrestha, lead author of the study and a research associate in horticulture and crop science at The Ohio State University.  

“When farmers grow their crops, they apply fertilizer and/or manure and use different kinds of machinery to till the soil,” said Shrestha. “In the process, greenhouse gases are produced and released into the atmosphere.”

But farmers could lessen this impact by applying biochar to their fields, according to the paper, recently published in the Journal of Environmental Quality.

“If we can convince farmers that converting biomass to biochar is good for the long-term sustainability of soils, the economy, and good for the environment, then we’ll be able to see wide adoption of this technology,” said Shrestha.

The researchers reviewed more than 200 field studies conducted across the globe that examined the impact of biochar application in agriculture on emissions of nitrous oxide, methane and carbon dioxide – heat-trapping gases that cause Earth’s atmosphere to warm.

The team found that the amount of biochar in the soil does have variable effects on local greenhouse gas emissions, which range from a decrease to an increase, and, in some cases, no change. But in general, the team discovered that the use of biochar in field settings lowered the amount of nitrous oxide in the air by about 18% and methane by 3%.

Biochar alone was also not effective at reducing carbon dioxide emissions, but did help when combined with commercial nitrogen fertilizer or other organic materials, like manure or compost. 

“We can achieve negative emission in our agroecosystems by reducing the carbon source and enhancing carbon sink,” said Shrestha. Reducing Earth’s carbon source can be achieved by reducing greenhouse gas emissions from our activities, and enhancing carbon sink – increasing the technology’s ability to absorb more carbon than it releases into the atmosphere – can be done by increasing the long-term soil carbon pool through conversion of organic waste into biochar, he said. 

“What’s good about biochar is that it contributes to both these aspects to create net negative agriculture,” said Shrestha.

Right now, when farmers leave crop residue on the field, only about 10% to 20% of the residue carbon is recycled into soil during the decomposition process, but by converting the same amount of residue to biochar and then applying it to the field, we can store about 50% of that carbon into stable carbon forms.”

As biochar-carbon placed in the soil can also last anywhere from a few hundred to thousands of years, it’s currently one of the proposed best management practices for achieving negative emissions and preventing Earth’s average temperature from increasing to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. 

According to the study, between 2011 and 2020, global greenhouse gas emissions rose: carbon dioxide by about 5.6%, methane by 4.2%, and nitrous oxide by 2.7% – and agriculture accounts for about 16% of these emissions. While such levels have already led to irreversible changes to the global climate system, Shrestha said that future damages could be slowed by helping to curb the extent of emissions from the farming and forestry sectors. 

Yet despite biochar’s potential as a negative emission technology and the recent increase in biochar-related research, it’s difficult to get farmers to apply it, partly because it hasn’t been commercialized for widespread use or promoted well, said Shrestha. 

To better deliver more science-based, practical information about the technology and its benefits to farmers and agriculture-related businesses, many lawmakers have enacted policies meant to investigate its effectiveness across many different soil types and environmental conditions. It’s an objective that Shrestha shares, as the main goal of his team’s review paper is to improve farmers’ confidence in biochar so that more of them choose to adopt it sooner. 

This study was supported by The Arthur P. Sloan Foundation. Other Ohio State co-authors were Laura E. Lindsey, Rattan Lal, Klaus Lorenz and Scott M. Demyan, as well as Pierre-Andre Jacinthe from Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis, Maninder P. Singh from Michigan State University and Wei Ren from the University of Kentucky. 

Home to one of the largest groundwater basins in the western United States, the Central Valley supplies about one-fifth of the nation’s groundwater demand, a large part of which is used to provide crop irrigation and aid agricultural production. 

The same area also accounts for about 75% of the region’s subsidence – the scientific term for the gradual sinking of an area of land. The leading cause of subsidence is the removal or disturbance of groundwater, which is found underground in soil and between rocks and sand. 

Combined with California’s large population, long history of drought and tendency to be battered by nearly every form of climate change, massive groundwater pumping is aggravating water scarcity, said Xuechen Yang, lead author of the case study and a graduate student in earth sciences at The Ohio State University. 

But it is not just California that has a growing issue with water scarcity.

“By 2025, more than 5 billion people around the world will live in water-stressed conditions,” said Yang. “Because land subsidence often makes human-made areas uninhabitable, those conditions can cause water and food insecurity issues.” These problems can lead to national security concerns, political instability, and even human migration disasters.

To help investigate solutions to these issues, Yang said that researchers are using satellite radar altimetry, which has a four-decades long record of observing the Earth, with creative new techniques to understand how Earth’s complex geophysical processes impact human life.

Satellite altimetry measures the time it takes a radar pulse to travel from the satellite to the Earth’s surface and back. Tiny changes in these measurements over time can indicate whether a specific point of land is rising or falling.

“Satellite radar altimetry is a mature technology and was designed to measure ocean topography and to monitor their changes over time,” said Yang. “Recent research demonstrated its feasibility in measuring elevation changes of relatively flat terrain, including land subsidence over aquifers, such as Central Valley, California, and other coastal regions.”

Using altimetry data from the European Space Agency’s Cryosat-2 mission, Yang’s team generated a low-gradient, two-dimensional map of land subsidence over Central Valley. 

Data from radar altimetry satellite missions including European Space Agency's Envisat satellite, as well as NASA’s and the French Space Agency (CNES)’s Jason-2 and Jason-3 satellites were processed to create a subsidence time series, an data analysis that spanned a decade or longer. After validating the Cryosat-2 derived results, the researchers were able to successfully detect the largest subsidence bowl near the city of Corcoran, California, which sinks at about a rate of about 30 to 35 centimeters per year.

Yet to advance their work, Yang said more data and better processing methods are needed before their tool can detect smaller deformations in other parts of the state. 

The research was presented last month at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union.

The study concluded that satellite altimetry could become an effective tool to monitor land subsidence. Additionally, because of its pinpoint accuracy and long data record, Yang said the research could be used to complement other geodetic techniques used to measure changes on the land.

“There is a very long history of drought in California, and the people who live there are struggling with it continuously,” said Yang. “Our work could be used to improve groundwater aquifer monitoring systems, and change hydrological policy for the better.”

Co-authors of the poster include C.K Shum of Ohio State, the principal investigator of the NASA Earth Surface Interior Program (ESI) project, and Ting-Yi Yang of Polaris Geospatial Services, who initiated the research project. The work was supported by the NASA ESI Program and the Topcon Positioning System Inc. Fellowship.

“Rare-earth elements, like Yttrium, for example, are necessary components of electronics, computers, and other gadgets that we use every day,” 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 The Ohio State University. 

The study, published in the journal Environmental Engineering Science, assesses an experimental process patented by the team that was shown to successfully clean coal mine drainage while producing rare-earth elements in samples from various rivers across Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia.

“One thing that surprised me was just how well our process cleans up the water,” said Bielicki. “From an environmental standpoint, the major benefit of this work is that we’re successfully trapping and neutralizing so much pollution.”

When abandoned coal mines leak water, the subsequent drainage can pollute thousands of miles of natural waterways, turning them orange, and can cause great injury to the ecosystem.

Although the rare earth elements that are in from coal mine drainage are in increasingly high demand, viable natural deposits of these minerals are found in only a few areas around the world, meaning that only a few countries can provide them.

For example, much of the Western world, including the United States, relies on China to supply about 80% of these critical resources. As a result, many government agencies seek to reduce this dependence by establishing a domestic supply of rare-earth elements, especially because getting them out of the ground can cause immense environmental and social harm, Bielicki said.

“By sourcing these materials from other countries, we don't really have any oversight of the environmental consequences of how they're mining and producing the materials,” he said. “Domestic production is good in a variety of ways, in part because we can have regulations that better protect the environment and the people in the communities from where we get them.”

Currently, coal mine drainage is treated using active treatment systems which employ chemicals to clean the water, or passive treatment systems, which often depend on bacterial activity or geochemical methods.

According to the study, passive approaches tend to require fewer resources and have fewer environmental impacts. The Ohio State team used a passive system employing a combination of alkaline industrial byproducts, including materials like water treatment plant sludge, to neutralize the coal drainage and capture the rare earth elements.

“It's designed to let the natural seepage of coal mine drainage percolate through the material to trap and extract it,” said Bielicki. The average time it takes to rid water of waste often varies, because the process largely depends on how quickly water flows out from the mine.

The process captured a variety of metals used in modern technology, including terbium, neodymium and europium, which play critical roles in phone displays, batteries, microphones, speakers and other parts.

The process is currently more costly than the current market price of rare metals, but further advances will bring the price down, Bielicki said.

Bielicki said he hopes their research will inform future policy surrounding coal waste disposal and help the public to examine the environmental repercussions of mining outside of typical costs, like its impact on human health and the ecosystem at large.

“Nothing we do to our environment is benign, so while shifting away from coal and other fossil fuels is beneficial in several different dimensions, we need to effect these transitions in ways that address a larger sphere of issues than just cost,“ he said. “Our research is a vital step in addressing the legacies of those environmental and social consequences.”

Other Ohio State co-authors of the study were Marcos Miranda, Soomin Chun, and Chin-Min Cheng. Other members of the team include Ohio State professors John Lenhart and Tarunjit Butalia. This work was supported by the Environmental Research Education Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy.

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.