News
The Trump administration’s May 2020 executive order on promoting American seafood competitiveness and economic growth lays out a plan for expanding the U.S. seafood industry, especially aquaculture, and enhance American seafood competitiveness in the global market. The goals of the directive are focused largely on growth and expansion of the industry, which includes wild-caught fisheries and farm-raised products, as well as recreation, processing and other industries that rely on fishing.
As the planet continues to warm, the twin challenges of diminishing water supply and growing energy demand will intensify. But water and energy are inextricably linked. For instance, nearly a fifth of California’s energy goes toward water-related activities, while more than a tenth of the state’s electricity comes from hydropower. As society tries to adapt to one challenge, it needs to ensure it doesn’t worsen the other.
In 2006, Greenpeace launched a campaign exposing deforestation caused by soy production in the Brazilian Amazon. In the previous year, soy farming expanded into more than 1,600 square kilometers of recently cleared forests. The destruction, they said, had to stop. In response, major soy companies in the region reached a landmark agreement as signatories to the Amazon Soy Moratorium (ASM), pledging not to purchase crops grown on recently cleared land. Deforestation fell in the following years, but no one had measured the moratorium’s aggregate impact.
With no dissolved oxygen to sustain animals or plants, ocean anoxic zones are areas where only microbes suited to the environment can live. These strange ecosystems are expanding, thanks to climate change — a development that is of concern for fisheries and anyone who relies on oxygen-rich oceans. But what piques Raven’s interest is the changing chemistry of the oceans — the Earth’s largest carbon sink — and how it could move carbon from the atmosphere to long-term reservoirs like rocks.
Geology professor Arthur Sylvester takes readers on a fieldtrip around Southern California with his new geology books. The new edition brings geologists Robert Sharp and Allen Glazner’s original paperback up to date with new information, colored photographs and exquisite maps created by O’Black Gans, a staff member in Santa Barbara City College’s Earth science department. The idea was to give a broad-brush overview of what people might want to know when they visit these places, Sylvester explained, without going into the minute details that a professional geologist would require.
The intertropical convergence zone (ITCZ), where the trade winds of the northern and southern hemispheres meet, is the world’s most important rainfall belt. New research suggests that a warming climate could lead to drier conditions in the margins of the zone, potentially exacerbating social tensions and possibly triggering mass migrations in the Neotropics, which include Central America.
In the first days of 2020, the Pacific Ocean archipelago nation of Palau took the momentous step of protecting 80% — 500,000 square kilometers — of its exclusive economic zone (EEZ) from fishing. The move is at once a cultural tradition, a far-sighted strategy for future generations and an example of the level of conservation needed to protect ocean biodiversity and habitat.
As illustrated by the many recent PG&E planned power outages, the wildfires that have ravaged California over the past decade are now beginning to affect the state in unexpected ways. Policymakers, professionals and scientists are working to develop new strategies to prevent and respond to wildfires. Among them is UC Santa Barbara Professor Charles Jones, who will take a comprehensive look at the issues affecting wildfires in a newly awarded $3.3 million project he will lead in 2020.