Our Impact on the Earth

“Mother Nature is not happy right now and she’s trying to tell us, in many ways,” says Kimberly Prather, Professor of Climate, Atmospheric Science, and Physical Oceanography at UC San Diego.

New weather patterns and events are causing concern but how do we know these changes are caused by human activity? Climate scientists are looking at trends over time to determine our impact on the planet.

Prather discusses recent CAICE studies aimed at advancing our understanding of how the oceans influence human and planetary health including novel experiments being conducted in a unique ocean-atmosphere simulator.

Watch — How Do We Know Humans are Impacting the Health of Our Planet? – Exploring Ethics

Bracing for Fire When the Wind Blows

As recent events have shown, strong winds can spell disaster, even without the presence of fire. But when a fire does occur, the ALERTWildfire camera network deployed across the region provides rapid confirmation of emergency wildfire 911 calls, situational awareness, and in the worst-case scenarios, real-time data to help sequence evacuations.

ALERTWildfire is a consortium of three universities: University of Nevada at Reno, UC San Diego, and University of Oregon. During the past three fire seasons (2016-2018), ALERTWildfire provided critical information for over 600 fires, including the Woolsey, Lilac, Wall, Whittier, Thomas, Tule, Woodchuck, Earthstone, Truckee, Draw, Snowstorm, Hot Pot, and Emerald fires; a 2016 arson spree in Lake Tahoe; and hundreds more.

Join Neal Driscoll to learn how California is using technology to help firefighters and improve public preparedness during wildfire disasters.

Watch — Bracing for Fire When the Wind Blows

The Future of our Oceans

Ours is a water planet. Technology is shaping our uses, both as foe and ally. It has made humans the dominant predator and provides us food, gives us half the oxygen we breathe and created many maritime jobs. But technology has also raised CO2 levels, caused acidic oceans, threatened ocean biodiversity and created grand climate challenges.

Marine biologists like Doug McCauley at UC Santa Barbara are also using technology to promote ocean health and provide a balance. In this talk, McCauley describes examples of technology used to help the oceans and marine biodiversity. He shows systems that track whale activity and communicate it to ships so they know where to slow down to avoid collisions. He describes technology to monitor marine protected areas, image recognition techniques to study the endangered giant sea bass and electronic tags to follow sharks.

McCauley began his career as a fisherman in the Port of Los Angeles. Eventually he migrated to marine science and UC Santa Barbara. McCauley has degrees in political science and biology from the UC Berkeley. His PhD research was done at Stanford University where he studied the ecology of sharks, giant parrotfish, and coral reef ecosystems. McCauley’s science is motivated by the belief that we must better understand how complex ocean ecosystems work if we want to better protect them from threats like overfishing, climate change, and pollution.

Watch — Technology: Friend or Foe for the Future of our Oceans

Understanding the Arctic Climate System

The Arctic is changing rapidly in response to global climate and economic activity and yet much of it remains unexplored with modern scientific techniques.

Jeff Bowman is a biological oceanographer who studies marine microbial communities. In this presentation at the Birch Aquarium at Scripps Institution of Oceanography he describes his group’s work in the Arctic as they seek to understand the ecological implications of changing sea ice conditions.

They are also preparing to participate in the Multidisciplinary drifting Observatory for the Study of Arctic Climate (MOSAiC) Expedition, an unprecedented multi-national effort to study the high Arctic across a complete seasonal cycle.

Watch — Modern Oceanography and the Changing Arctic Ocean.

Sustainable California

From the snowy watersheds of the Cascades and Sierras, to the world’s most productive agricultural valley and on to the sea, visit Sustainable California and see what your University, its people and friends are doing to find real-world solutions to maintain the sustainability and vitality of our state.

From cultivating soil biota to purify groundwater, to managing fish stocks, to collaborative management of our unique California landscape to laying the foundations of carbon free energy sources, see what California is doing to maintain its unique biodiversity, sustain the human and environmental health of our state and meet the 21st century challenges of global climate change.

Browse more programs in Sustainable California