Earth System Science

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed life as we know it with tremendous impact to our work, our homes, families and everything in between. With so many changes, staying motivated and connected to research interests is hard! Through the Physical Sciences #UCIReignite campaign we hope to spur our research community to reconnect with their passion for science. 

The glaciers of Antarctica are melting at unprecedented rates, and a giant canyon in the continent's rocky underbelly could make matters much worse.

After an unusually warm summer, Greenland’s ice sheet has lost 600 billion tons of ice, according to recently released NASA data.

Irvine, Calif., March 23, 2020 – East Antarctica’s Denman Glacier has retreated 5 kilometers, nearly 3 miles, in the past 22 years, and researchers at the University of California, Irvine and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are concerned that the shape of the ground surface beneath the ice sheet could make it even more susceptible to climate-driven collapse.

Irvine, Calif., March 18, 2020 – During the exceptionally warm Arctic summer of 2019, Greenland lost 600 billion tons of ice, enough to raise global sea levels by 2.2 millimeters in two months. On the opposite pole, Antarctica continued to lose mass in the Amundsen Sea Embayment and Antarctic Peninsula but saw some relief in the form of increased snowfall in Queen Maud Land, in the eastern part of the continent.

California’s strict environmental regulations have long concerned some farmers, who say that restrictions around things such as water use are at odds with the agricultural industry. The state’s air pollution standards, though, which are among the strictest in the country, are a boon to farmers: The reductions in ground ozone resulted in $600 million worth of increased crop production annually.

On February 19, Professors Eric Rignot, Timothy Tait and Jenny Yang all received 2019-2020 Distinguished Faculty Awards from the UCI Academic Senate during an evening ceremony at the Newkirk Alumni Center. The professors swept the Senates’ research awards categories; Professor Rignot received the Distinguished Senior Faculty Award for Research, while Professors Yang and Tait received the Distinguished Mid-Career Faculty Award for Research and the Distinguished Early-Career Faculty Award for…

In 2019, record fires in the Amazon sparked international outrage and capped a decade that saw the rainforest lose an area the size of 8.4 million soccer fields to deforestation.

Greenland is losing ice mass seven times faster than in the 1990s, a pace that matches the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s high-end warming scenario – in which 400 million people would be exposed to coastal flooding by 2100, 40 million more than in the mid-range prediction.

Eight new faculty members join the School of Physical Sciences from universities across the world, bringing new research right from their Ph.D. programs and others bringing their established research ready to revamp. Here are the new faculty members:

California’s 2018 wildfire season was the deadliest and most destructive ever recorded: At least 100 people were killed, more than 24,000 structures were consumed and nearly 2 million acres were burned, according to the California Department of Forestry & Fire Protection.

A new study shows that the deepest point on land is under the Denman Glacier in East Antarctica. Glaciologists at the University of California, Irvine, were mapping the area only to find that the trough under the glacier went far deeper than they had imagined.