Research & Academics

Aug. 22, 2019

Pools of old carbon in the soil of boreal forests historically safe from combustion are being released by more frequent and larger wildfires, a team led by researchers at Northern Arizona University announced in Nature this week. As the climate of these forests in the Northwest Territories of Canada becomes warmer, drier and prone to more frequent fires, the combustion of “legacy carbon,” as the research team calls it, has the potential to shift the global… Read more

Aug. 15, 2019

When Jaime Yazzie began planning her research for her forestry thesis, her adviser asked her what species of trees she wanted to save. They would use a computer simulation to measure the effects of a warming, drying environment, and she needed to select which trees to preserve.

“I was a little shocked,” Yazzie said. “In my mind, they’re one big family. To lose one would be like losing a sibling.”

Yazzie, who is Diné, took a different approach with her… Read more

Aug. 12, 2019

What effect do zero-net homes have on the energy grid? What’s the dollar value of a healthy ecosystem, and what does that look like in the ever-changing Southwest? What are the best methods to protect forests from catastrophic fires? How does all of this affect the average resident of the Phoenix area?

These questions, critical in a time of warming climate and a place like Arizona, where healthy land, air and water play an important role in our lives, are at the forefront of a… Read more

Aug. 1, 2019

The American population is aging, and conditions such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease are on the rise. With those factors in place, the medical community has growing concerns about wound treatment. According to the American Professional Wound Care Association, about 15 percent of Medicare recipients suffer chronic, nonhealing wounds with an annual cost of about $30 billion.

One challenge physicians repeatedly face in treating wounds is the threat of bacterial infection. Closing the wound helps reduce the risk, but if pathogens infect the compromised… Read more

July 29, 2019

Triton orbits Neptune, the eighth planet from the Sun, some 2.7 billion miles from Earth—at the cold outer fringe of the Solar System’s major planet zone. Surface temperatures hover near absolute zero, so low that common compounds we know as gases on Earth freeze into ices. Triton’s atmosphere, which is 70,000 times less dense than Earth’s, is composed of nitrogen, methane and carbon monoxide.

These extreme conditions have led to an extraordinary discovery on Triton. An international team of scientists used the 8-meter Gemini… Read more

July 24, 2019

A team of climate scientists at Northern Arizona University, along with their international collaborators, has completed new reconstructions of Earth’s temperature over the past 2,000 years, placing the exceptional 20^th-century warming into a longer-term context, as chronicled in a study published today in Nature Geoscience.

This international collaboration, part of the PAGES 2k Consortium, used a new, highly curated set of paleoclimate data and compared seven different statistical methods for reconstructing past global average temperature. Put simply, they found these different ways of measuring climate change… Read more