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A new map of butterfly heritage suggests an origin in North or Central America some 100 million years ago. 
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The waters off California's coast are acidifying twice as fast as the global average, according to a new federal study.
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My job is to write about the wonders and challenges of our coast and oceans, but I’ll admit: Before this story, I had no idea what an abalone looked like.
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A boat is arriving in Ventura Harbor, wrapping up a trip from the Channel Islands which was more than 20 million years in the making. As Santa Barbara
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This month marks a year since the Aug. 5, 2017 flash flood and subsequent investigations in New Orleans.
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A long-lost trove of preserved animal specimens recently turned up at a university in Georgia. Those old squirrels and muskrats could hold the answers to questions we haven't even thought to ask yet.
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We can understand Earth's history by digging into layers of sediment millions of years old
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From
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PIRatE Lab's insight:
Washington D.C. is a drained wetland.
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From the Oregon border to Sonoma County, California's coastline is largely gorgeous because of the efforts of a few pioneers who fought off developers
PIRatE Lab's insight:
The roots of the California Coastal Act.
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Ecologists restoring parts of San Francisco Bay are guided by tattered maps, old snapshots, even paintings of a vanished world.
PIRatE Lab's insight:
A great example of the classic mantra of using historic maps and historic conditions to guide restoration plans.
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John Muir is the patron saint of environmentalism, an epic figure whose writings of mystical enlightenment attained during lone treks in California's wilderness glorified individualism, saved Yosemite and helped establish the national park system.
PIRatE Lab's insight:
This seems to clearly be an deliberate attempt to provoke debate and drive people to their conference/news stories...because we all know the UCLA Geography is the hub of cutting edge sustainability science.
All snark aside, this seems to be a strange and yet common refrain: that out leaders and heroes from the past were not all they were cracked up to be, imperfect human beings who flaws often outnumbered their singular achievements. But does that mean it is time to eject these individuals for our cultural pantheon? To be sure I have have a much more nuanced view of Martin Luther King in the wake the revelations about his affairs, of Thomas Jefferson in the wake of the revelations of his slave ownership and yellow journalism, etc.
But the reject of these figures as they were not perfect seems very simplistic and childish in my book. Something that a senior in High School or freshman in college sprawled on her dorm floor eating pizza suddenly makes them see the world is less black and white tones. To be sure, wearing rose-tinted glasses is not the recommended course. But similarly inadvisable is to toss the baby out with the bathwater per se.
To argue that the environmental movement has morphed into the more inclusionary sustainability movement is to state the obvious. Part of this evolution is the understanding that this movement needs to be much broader-based, acknowledge the more typical global (as opposed to American) view of wilderness and protected areas, and come to terms with problems not understood in previous generations.
But Muir still has much to teach us: the power of effective communication with the masses who are ignorant of the power and value of our natural world, the ability of a generation to forestall short-term gains for longer term benefits to ourselves and groups beyond ourselves, and the absolute spiritual value and (what we now have come to call) ecosystem services. There is much to learn also from someone who was nearly blind and chose to dedicate their life to a larger purpose.
The rejection of Muir sounds like someone is bucking for tenure or seeking to get a new funding source, not a proper debate about the value of one the largest figures in the U.S. in the late 19th and early 20th century.
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VIMS professor John Milliman cautions that the drought now gripping the American West is likely to continue, while California invites professors Elizabeth Canuel and Rob Latour to advise the state on how it should respond to the threat.
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Will the dating of the volcanic eruption of Santorini remain an unsolved mystery? The question whether this natural disaster occurred 3,500 or 3,600 years ago is of great historiographical importance and has indeed at times been the subject of heated discussion among experts. After investigating tree rings, scientists have concluded that the volcano erupted in the 16th century BC, rather than any earlier than that.
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Data from Cold War nuclear bomb tests help scientists accurately age whale sharks for the first time.
PIRatE Lab's insight:
Another marker of the Anthropocene...
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The Natural History Museums of Los Angeles had narrowed the choice down to three architectural teams: Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Weiss/Manfredi and Dorte Mandrup.
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This is the second in a series exploring the coastal communities that once surrounded greater New Orleans, principally along the brackish waters of the tidal lagoon known as Lake Pontchartrain.
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The first in-depth analysis of Otzi the Iceman's stomach contents offer a rare glimpse of Europeans’ dietary habits more than 5,000 years ago. Otzi’s last meal was high in fat, most likely from an ibex.
PIRatE Lab's insight:
This is one of my classical examples of how humans have been impacting the natural world for a long, long time. This wonderful new study shows (amongst other things) that we were manipulating the abundance, distribution, and/or behavior of plants and animals in central Europe for AT LEAST many thousands of years.
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When the scientific journal Nature published in April an article arguing that a mastodon site in San Diego was more than 130,000 years old, it created a firestorm in the world of American archaeology.
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Researchers are relying on radiocarbon from bomb tests decades ago to learn more about endangered hawksbill turtles in the Hawaiian Islands.
PIRatE Lab's insight:
Reconstructing how changed ecosystems have become via a key member of coral reef and pelagic ecosystems.
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The only wolf ever documented in Southern California may have been a victim of mistaken identity nearly a century ago.
PIRatE Lab's insight:
This is one of my old professors who lives canid DNA. An interesting finding that seems sure to push the range of this wolf subspecies into southern California. Pretty neat and a potentially powerful argument for SoCal wolf reintroductions!
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Volcanic islands can seem to appear out of nowhere, emerging from the ocean like breaching monsters of the deep. Below, Mika McKinnon explains how these odd geological formations are born, how they evolve, and how they eventually vanish back beneath the waves.
PIRatE Lab's insight:
Darwin was the first to bring an academic overview to the formation of these coral-harboring islands but the beauty and diversity were really first brought home with free aerial imagery (ala Google Earth, etc.). Where an island is along this developmental continuum says much about the human populations that may inhabit said island. If the island is tall and young with rich volcanic soil, the mountain will attract rainfall and the soil could support agriculture, making the island able to sustain a higher population density. On the other hand, an old, eroding island with little rainfall and depleted soils will need human inhabitants to rely on the ocean's resources for food and would thus support a more minimal population. These islands are changing, even if the time scale is slow--but just recently two disconnected islands 'merged' as growing volcanic island has expanded in the Pacific.
Matthew Richmond's curator insight,
December 2, 2015 3:30 PM
Re-scooped from Professor Dixon, pretty cool story on the formation of islands in the south Pacific. A couple of them look like the island visible from the beach in Rincon, Puerto Rico where I stayed. The island is one giant rock so nobody lives there and it's a naval base for the U.S. military. This, however, is a different situation when you realize that not only do people live here, but kind of a lot of people live here. 
Matt Ramsdell's curator insight,
December 14, 2015 9:00 PM
What causes the death and the caldera in a volcano? One thing that happens in a deceased volcano is the center of the volcano starts to either erode or the inside finally caves in. Once this happen a caldera takes shape and the ocean starts to take over. As the waves eat away at the shores it will eventually create a island that is shaped like a "U". After this happens that island will someday retreat back into the ocean and someday form a barrier reef. 
Adam Deneault's curator insight,
December 14, 2015 10:52 PM
Based on general knowledge, I know that the taller a volcano is, the younger it is and the shorter it is, the older it is. The reason they start to get short is from erosion. Hot spots in the Earth's crust make small islands from molten rock. Young islands can be very dangerous, because if they are inhabited, they have the possibility of erupting, whereas an old island does not since the volcano is lnactice and eroding. Over time the inactive volcano will crumble and a caldera will take shape and after even more time, that caldera will slip under the ocean and become a reef.
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Researchers have documented multiple droughts in California that lasted 10 or 20 years in a row during the past 1,000 years.
PIRatE Lab's insight:
More mounting concern about our expanding drought and its possible duration.
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