In the Pacific Northwest, Tufted Puffins breed on hard-to-access steep rocks and islands along coast, making it challenging to assess their existing nesting habitat. In the past, images were opportunistically captured via helicopter flights, but appropriate use of drones is slowly becoming an option for seabird research.

It’s been a very soggy spring along Maine’s coastline. Not the type to let wet weather dampen their spirits, intrepid biologists have returned to seabird islands to listen to what birds tell us about their changing environments, and enthusiastic educators are sharing these stories and inspiring new audiences to act on behalf of birds and people.

Users connect to discuss current systems and prepare for the future of supercomputing

In October, the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility — a Department of Energy Office of Science user facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory — hosted its 19th annual user meeting dedicated to sharing achievements, updates and best practices for the facility’s supercomputers. It also provided a sneak peek of plans for the OLCF’s next-generation system, currently dubbed OLCF-6.

The 2023 edition marked a re

CyberShake Study 22.12 is the largest set of earthquake simulations ever conducted by the Statewide California Earthquake Center

Researchers at the Statewide California Earthquake Center, or SCEC, are unraveling the mysteries of earthquakes by using physics-based computational models running on high-performance computing systems at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The team’s findings will provide a better understanding of seismic hazards in the Golden State.

Building o

We’ve known for years that many of Earth’s forests are dying out and struggling to replenish their populations. At the Forest Global Earth Observatory, or ForestGEO, scientists are attempting to get to the root of this issue. A global network of research sites and scientists, ForestGEO studies how climate change is affecting tropical and temperate forests globally. Worldwide, ForestGEO examines how forests are changing over time at 67 sites in 27 countries. This totals to about 12,000 species an

When the word fossil comes to mind, the first thing many people think of are dinosaurs. Of course, dinosaurs are long extinct. Yet, as crazy as it sounds, we can find ourselves walking under the shade of a special fossil that grew in the age of the dinosaurs too. We call this “fossil” a ginkgo tree–an ancient plant giving us a glimpse into the future.

All summer long, three passionate interns at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC) have been hard at work studying a large plot of

Most people need to visit the ocean to get their sea water fix. But beneath their feet, those waters may already be closer than they think. “Saltwater intrusion,” which occurs when the sea level rises and pushes large amounts of saltwater onto the coast, is one of the most prominent—and least talked about—effects of climate change. Its influence on the Chesapeake Bay, one of the lowest regions in the United States, is gaining traction.

As the planet heats up, ice melts and warming water expands