Climate & Environment
- <p class="p1">No one really knows how the High Plains got so high. °Ç¸ç³Ô¹Ï 70 million years ago, eastern Colorado, southeastern Wyoming, western Kansas and western Nebraska were near sea level. Since then, the region has risen about 2 kilometers, leading to some head scratching at geology conferences.  </p>
- <p>Oil and gas operations in the United States produce about 21 billion barrels of wastewater per year. The saltiness of the water and the organic contaminants it contains have traditionally made treatment difficult and expensive. Engineers at the °Ç¸ç³Ô¹Ï have invented a simpler process that can simultaneously remove both salts and organic contaminants from the wastewater, all while producing additional energy.</p>
<p>A new $2.5 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to a coalition of organizations including the °Ç¸ç³Ô¹Ï will be used to help improve wind energy forecasting in mountain and valley regions.</p>- <p>A massive new °Ç¸ç³Ô¹Ï study indicates there is a statistical link between hotter temperatures generated by climate change and the risk of armed conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa.</p>
<p>CU-°Ç¸ç³Ô¹Ï Professor John O’Loughlin led a research team that assessed more than 78,000 armed conflicts between 1980 and 2012 in the Sahel region of Africa – a semi-arid belt just south of the Saharan Desert that spans about 3,000 miles and more than a dozen countries from the Atlantic to the Indian oceans.</p>
<p>A new study led by the University of California, Berkeley and involving the °Ç¸ç³Ô¹Ï indicates the current response to wildfires around the world—aggressively fighting them—is not making society less vulnerable to such events.</p>- <p>The °Ç¸ç³Ô¹Ï was ranked second in the world in geosciences this week by U.S. News & World Report.</p>
<p>CU-°Ç¸ç³Ô¹Ï trailed only the California Institute of Technology. Rounding out the top five are the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich, Harvard University and the University of Washington. U.S. News & World Report ranked the top 100 universities in geosciences in 2014 based primarily on their research and reputation.</p>
<p>Former NASA astronaut Bruce McCandless will present °Ç¸ç³Ô¹Ï senior Jeni Sorli with a $10,000 scholarship from the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation during a free public campus event on Thursday, Oct. 30.</p>
<p>NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft has provided scientists their first look at a storm of energetic solar particles at Mars and produced unprecedented ultraviolet images of the tenuous oxygen, hydrogen and carbon coronas surrounding the Red Planet, said °Ç¸ç³Ô¹Ï Professor Bruce Jakosky, the mission’s principal investigator.</p>
<p>NASA has awarded a team led by the °Ç¸ç³Ô¹Ï more than $7 million to study aspects of the origins, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.</p>
Colorado’s Front Range fire severity today not much different than in past, says CU-°Ç¸ç³Ô¹Ï study<p>The perception that Colorado’s Front Range wildfires are becoming increasingly severe does not hold much water scientifically, according to a massive new study led by the °Ç¸ç³Ô¹Ï and Humboldt State University in Arcata, Calif.</p>