Earth System Science

Mar 18, 2020
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.
Mar 17, 2020
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.
Mar 6, 2020
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…
Jan 13, 2020
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.
Dec 19, 2019
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.
Dec 17, 2019
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:
Dec 16, 2019
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.
Dec 14, 2019
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.
Dec 12, 2019
Irvine, Calif., Dec. 12, 2019 – A University of California, Irvine-led team of glaciologists has unveiled the most accurate portrait yet of the contours of the land beneath Antarctica’s ice sheet – and, by doing so, has helped identify which regions of the continent are going to be more, or less, vulnerable to future climate warming.
Dec 10, 2019
Global Environmental Change: Causes, Impacts, Solutions. The Department of Earth System Science (ESS) at the University of California, Irvine, focuses on how the atmosphere, land, and oceans interact as a system, and how the Earth will change over a human lifetime. With global change projected to accelerate through the 21st century, ESS has made a commitment to study the causes and impacts of climate change and more importantly the solutions. With top experts in fields ranging from atmospheric…
Nov 26, 2019
Irvine, Calif., Nov. 26, 2019 — Nine University of California, Irvine researchers in areas ranging from neurodevelopment and chemical synthesis to labor economics and library sciences have been named fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world’s largest general scientific society.
Nov 26, 2019
Professors Steven Allison, James Bullock, Steven Davis, James Randerson, Eric Rignot, Isabella Velicogna and Jasper Vrugt have been named to the Highly Cited Researchers 2019 global list.