When runoff from farmland and urban areas enters our streams and rivers, it carries a heavy load of fertilizers and nutrients. These substances accumulate and flow into our coastal oceans, triggering a series of reactions that can create hypoxic ‘dead zones’. Dead zones are low-oxygen, or hypoxic, areas in the world’s oceans and lakes. Because most organisms need oxygen to live, very f ...[Read More]
On the desolate Antarctic peninsula, a colony of penguins creates a hub of biodiversity. One may ask, how exactly do those aquatic birds help maintain and enrich the variety of different kinds of organisms from plants and animals, to a wide range of insects and micro-organisms that live on our planet? The answer is quite intriguing. Scientists from the University of Science and Technology of China ...[Read More]
Picture this: bacteria that can slime their way around the soil, finding their prey, circling it, closing in on it and lysing it (or making their cell pop), just to feed on their prey. It sounds like a far stretch from a wolf to a bacteria, but even other soil predators, the comparably huge nematode worms ( up to 100 times bigger!), are afraid of these bacterial “wolves”. I went to the Soil System ...[Read More]
In this month’s GeoPolicy blog post, Dr Grace Skirrow outlines how researchers can share their expertise with environmental regulators to have policy impact and the role that fluvial geomorphology can play in policy decisions. Fluvial Geomorphology and why it is relevant for policymakers Fluvial Geomorphology (“fluvial”, derived from the Latin “fluvialis”, meaning “of the river”) is the study of l ...[Read More]
