water
One step closer to living on Mars: NAU scientists contribute to NASA’s “treasure map” of widespread water ice near planet’s surface
In anticipation of sending humans to Mars by 2033, NASA scientists are searching for suitable locations to land on the Red Planet. Ideally, these potential landing sites would have high scientific value for exploration while offering natural resources to sustain human life.… Read more
NAU scientists launch FEWSION website, enabling access to complex maps of food, energy, water supply chains
Over the past three years, Ben Ruddell, associate professor of NAU’s School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems (SICCS), has led a team of multi-institution engineers and data scientists in developing FEWSION, a data fusion project that maps the food, energy and water supply chains for every community in the United States. The maps are based on an… Read more
There will be an app for that: NAU scientists researching intermittent streams with smartphone technology
As collaborators on one of the first coordinated ecology research projects to study what happens to streams as they dry across the United States, Northern Arizona University researchers Ben Ruddell and Abe Springer will develop an improved smartphone application for mapping wet and dry reaches of streams.
Based on lessons learned from phone apps developed to map the desert springs of… Read more
NAU planetary scientist’s study suggests widespread presence of water on the Moon
NAU assistant professor of planetary science Christopher Edwards co-authored a paper recently published in Nature Geoscience that has generated interest among scientists in the field as well as in mainstream science news, such as Science Dailyand Outer Places.
The researchers analyzed remote-sensing data from two lunar missions and concluded that water appears to be evenly spread across the surface of the moon, not confined to a particular region or type of terrain as… Read more
NAU ecosystem scientist’s study finds more frequent droughts may endanger ecosystem resiliency
In a new paper published in Nature, research assistant professor Christopher Schwalm of Northern Arizona University’s Center for Ecosystem Science and Society (Ecoss) shares the results of a study investigating the impact of more frequent droughts on ecosystem resiliency and how this phenomenon could endanger the land carbon sink.
Earth’s land carbon sink comprises all the planet’s soils and vegetation, including forests, grasslands and agricultural… Read more