Our stories. Your impact.

Professor Brenda Bowen examines what the traces left by an ever-changing planet can tell us about what’s to come   As a professor of geology and geophysics, Brenda Bowen wants her students to understand how long the planet Earth has been around and that there’s nothing static about its surface or subsurface. “Our planet is 4.6 billion years old and, throughout that time, it’s been continually changing. The only constant is change,” Bowen says. “The current configuration of where continents, mountains, and oceans are is just this moment in time.” Bowen is the chair of the Department of Atmospheric Sciences…

Today atmospheric carbon dioxide is at its highest level in at least several million years thanks to widespread combustion of fossil fuels by humans over the past couple centuries. But where does 419 parts per million (ppm)—the current concentration of the greenhouse gas in the atmosphere—fit in Earth’s history?

For the tenth year in a row, research funding hit another landmark year, reaching $768 million in fiscal year 2023.

The University of Utah community is saddened by the loss of alum John Warnock—a scientist, humanist and trailblazer in computer graphics.

As the shrinking Great Salt Lake exposes an ever-growing area of its lakebed, wind-blown dust becomes more dangerous for those living in Utah’s most populous region. It also makes the snowpack dirty, which threatens the state’s most precious resource—water. In a new study, University of Utah researchers analyzed the impact of dust on snow during the 2022 season. They found that 2022 had the most dust deposition events and the highest snowpack dust concentrations of any year since observations began in 2009. The dust caused the snowpack to disappear 17 days earlier than if no dust had been deposited. The…

Anke Friedrich BS’90 MS’93 is an endowed professor of geology at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich where she established a Master’s degree program in geology, led international student field trips involving U students, and set up student exchange programs with several international institutions, including the U. She is an adjunct professor at the U’s Department of Geology & Geophysics and in 2019 she received the department’s Distinguished Alumni Award. She played a crucial role in establishing one of the world’s first continuously operating space-geodetic networks, which served to monitor the tectonic activity around Yucca Mountain, the then-proposed nuclear waste repository site.…

The geography that makes Utah unique—red rock deserts, greatest snow on Earth, cities amidst natural beauty—also makes us vulnerable to one of the biggest challenges of our time: Climate change, which can drive or exacerbate severe drought, wildfires, air pollution, water scarcity, and disappearing snowpack. Luckily, the University of Utah has a deep pool of experts who use the campus location as a living laboratory to address these immense challenges. A generous $20 million gift from Clay and Marie Wilkes will leverage the U’s location and interdisciplinary knowledge to create the Wilkes Center for Climate Science and Policy. William (Bill)…