Category: Top Stories

With temperatures hitting record lows in the midwest last week, John Magnuson, an aquatic ecologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a co-author on the Nature study, warned that it’s important to understand that the loss of lake ice won’t happen all at once.

For almost ten years, Jonathan Pauli and M. Zachariah Peery, professors at the University of Wisconsin, and their colleagues have been tracking a group of sloths in Costa Rica. The animals are equipped with radio collars that transmit their location five or six times a month, so the team knows where each sloth’s usual territory is.

’These are very common human viruses that circulate worldwide and cause ’the sniffles’ in kids,’ Tony Goldberg, a University of Wisconsin–Madison professor, said.

The researchers, led by Richard Levy of New Zeland’s GNS Science and Victoria University of Wellington and Stephen Meyers of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, were able to recreate a broad history of the Antarctic ice sheet going back 34 million years to when the ice sheet first formed — documenting multiple cycles of ice growth and decay resulting from natural variations in the planet’s tilt.

A new study has revealed that variations in the Earth’s axial tilt are linked to dramatic shifts in the the Antarctic Ice Sheet. A research team led by the University of Wisconsin-Madison has matched the planet’s celestial motions with the geologic record of Antarctica’s ice.

This irony is documented in a newly published study by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers Benjamin Zuckerberg and Jennifer McCabe. Their research focused on the city of Chicago.

The study’s lead author, Kevin Burke, worked with paleoecologist Dr. John Williams of the University of Wisconsin-Madison to assess the climatic characteristics of several geologic time periods, including the Early Eocene (beginning 56 million years ago), the mid-Pliocene (beginning 3.3 million years ago), the Last Interglacial (beginning 130,000 years ago), the mid-Holocene (beginning 7,000 years ago), the pre-industrial era (beginning in 1750), and the early 20th century.

University of Wisconsin researchers say the Earth’s climate could warm to temperatures seen up to 50 million years ago.

During that ancient time, known as the mid-Pliocene epoch, temperatures were higher by about 2 to 4 degrees Celsius (3.6 to 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) and sea levels were higher by roughly 20 meters (almost 66 feet) than today, explained Kevin D. Burke, lead author of the study and a researcher and Ph.D. candidate at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“We are living through, and causing, a geological-scale episode of global change, and are climatically rewinding the clock by millions of years,” John “Jack” Williams, professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Newsweek.

‘We can use the past as a yardstick to understand the future, which is so different from anything we have experienced in our lifetimes,’ says paleoecologist John “Jack” Williams, professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“If we think about the future in terms of the past, where we are going is uncharted territory for human society. We are moving towards very dramatic changes over an extremely rapid time frame, reversing a planetary cooling trend in a matter of centuries,” says the study’s lead author, Kevin Burke, a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison).

John Williams, a professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that in 25 years society had gone from expecting climate change to seeing its harmful effects.