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Tag: Earth science

  • Police: Ex-grad student kills Arizona professor on campus

    Police: Ex-grad student kills Arizona professor on campus

    TUCSON, Ariz. — The University of Arizona has released the name of a professor who authorities said was fatally shot on campus by a former graduate student.

    University President Robert Robbins identified the victim late Wednesday as Thomas Meixner, who had headed the school’s Department of Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences.

    “This incident is a deep shock to our community, and it is a tragedy,” Robbins said in a statement. “I have no words that can undo it, but I grieve with you for the loss, and I am pained especially for Tom’s family members, colleagues and students.”

    Police said Meixner was shot Wednesday afternoon inside the Harshbarger Building, which houses the hydrology department.

    Meixner was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

    A few hours after the shooting, state troopers stopped a former graduate student, 46-year-old Murad Dervish, in a van about 120 miles (193 kilometers) northwest of the Tucson campus, university Police Chief Paula Balafas said during a news conference.

    Dervish was being held at the Pima County jail awaiting his initial court appearance. It wasn’t immediately clear what charges he might be face or whether he has a lawyer yet who could speak on his behalf.

    According to campus police, a female called 911 at around 2 p.m. Wednesday asking for police to escort a former student out of the Harshbarger Building. Balafas said someone recognized Dervish “and knew that he was not allowed inside the building,” although Balafas didn’t explain why.

    Officers were on their way to the building when they received reports that a man shot and wounded someone before fleeing, Balafas said.

    The building is near the university bookstore and student union, and campus alerts instructed people to avoid the area, which was under lockdown.

    Classes, activities and other campus events were canceled for the rest of the day. Classes resumed on Thursday, but Balafas said the building where the shooting happened might remain closed.

    When asked how well Dervish and Meixner knew one another, Balafas said she didn’t know.

    Meixner earned a doctorate in hydrology and water resources from the university in 1999 and joined the faculty in 2005 before becoming the department head in 2019. He was considered an expert on desert water issues.

    Various faculty members and former students took to social media to praise Meixner as a kind and brilliant colleague.

    Karletta Chief, director of the university’s Indigenous Resilience Center, said she met Meixner when she was a graduate student in 2001 and he was new to the faculty. While she was not one of his students, her research in hydrology led to frequent collaborations. The last time she saw Meixner, who was a big supporter of Native American and indigenous communities researching water issues, was a week ago at a seminar his department co-sponsored.

    Chief said she emailed Meixner and several others in the hydrology department after the shooting, and that she was devastated to learn he was the one who had been shot.

    “It’s just unimaginable that anybody would have any direct anger toward him. He was completely the opposite of that. He was just so kind and positive and always wanting to help,” said Chief, who noted that Meixner never mentioned to her if there had been any trouble with a current or former student.

    Meixner was also generous outside of campus, Chief said. He once gave money for a marathon that she ran to benefit the Lymphoma Society.

    “He shared that he was thankful for me doing this run and he was a cancer survivor,” she said.

    It was 20 years ago this month that a disgruntled University of Arizona nursing student shot and killed three nursing professors before taking his own life.

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  • Climate change made summer drought 20 times more likely

    Climate change made summer drought 20 times more likely

    Drought that stretched across three continents this summer — drying out large parts of Europe, the United States and China — was made 20 times more likely by climate change, according to a new study.

    Drought dried up major rivers, destroyed crops, sparked wildfire, threatened aquatic species and led to water restrictions in Europe. It struck places already plagued by drying in the U.S., like the West, but also places where drought is more rare, like the Northeast. China also just had its driest summer in 60 years, leaving its famous Yangtze river half its normal width.

    Researchers from World Weather Attribution, a group of scientists from around the world who study the link between extreme weather and climate change, say this type of drought would only happen once every 400 years across the Northern Hemisphere if not for human-caused climate change. Now they expect these conditions to repeat every 20 years, given how much the climate has warmed.

    Ecological disasters like the widespread drought and then massive flooding in Pakistan, are the “fingerprints of climate change,” Maarten van Aalst, a climate scientist at Columbia University and study co-author, said.

    “The impacts are very clear to people and are hitting hard,” he said, “not just in poor countries, like the flooding Pakistan …. but also in some of the richest parts of the world, like western central Europe.”

    To figure out the influence of climate change on drying in the Northern Hemisphere, scientists analyzed weather data, computer simulations and soil moisture throughout the regions, excluding tropical areas. They found that climate change made dry soil conditions much more likely over the last several months.

    This analysis was done using the warming the climate has already experienced so far, 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit), but climate scientists have warned the climate will get warmer, and the authors of the study accounted for that.

    With an additional 0.8 degrees C degrees warming, this type of drought will happen once every 10 years in western Central Europe and every year throughout the Northern Hemisphere, said Dominik Schumacher, a climate scientist at ETH Zurich, a university in Switzerland.

    “We’re seeing these compounding and cascading effect across sectors and across regions,” van Aalst said. “One way to reduce those impacts (is) to reduce emissions.”

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    Follow Drew Costley on Twitter: @drewcostley.

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    The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Department of Science Education. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Baltic Sea pipeline leak damages marine life and climate

    Baltic Sea pipeline leak damages marine life and climate

    WASHINGTON — Methane escaping from the damaged Nord Stream pipelines that run between Russia and Europe is likely to result in the biggest known gas leak to take place over a short period of time and highlights the problem of large methane escapes elsewhere around the world, scientists say.

    There is still uncertainty in estimating total damage, but researchers say vast plumes of this potent greenhouse gas will have significant detrimental impacts on the climate.

    Immediate harm to marine life and fisheries in the Baltic Sea and to human health will also result because benzene and other trace chemicals are typically present in natural gas, researchers say.

    “This will probably be the biggest gas leak ever, in terms of its rate,” said Stanford University climate scientist Rob Jackson.

    The velocity of the gas erupting from four documented leaks in the pipelines — which the North Atlantic Treaty Organization has attributed to sabotage — is part of what makes the impacts severe.

    When methane leaks naturally leaks from vents on the ocean floor, the quantities are usually small and the gas is mostly absorbed by seawater. “But this is not a normal situation for gas release,” said Jackson. “We’re not talking about methane bubbling up to the surface like seltzer water, but a plume of rushing gas,” he said.

    Jackson and other scientists estimate that between 50% and nearly 100% of total methane emitted from the pipeline will reach the atmosphere.

    The Danish government issued a worst case scenario that assumed all the gas reached the air, and German officials Thursday issued a somewhat lower one.

    In the meantime, it’s nearly impossible for anyone to approach the highly flammable plume to attempt to curb the release of gas, which energy experts estimate may continue until Sunday.

    “Methane is very flammable — if you go in there, you’d have a good chance of it being a funeral pyre,” said Ira Leifer, an atmospheric scientist. If the gas-air mix was within a certain range, an airplane could easily ignite travelling into the plume, for example.

    Methane isn’t the only risk. “Natural gas isn’t refined to be super clean — there are trace elements of other compounds, like benzene,” a carcinogen, said Leifer.

    “The amount of these trace elements cumulatively entering the environment is significant right now — this will cause issues for fisheries and marine ecosystems and people who potentially eat those fish,” he said.

    David Archer, a professor in the geophysical sciences department at University of Chicago who focuses on the global carbon cycle, said that escape of methane in the Baltic Sea is part of the much larger worldwide problem of methane emissions.

    The gas is a major contributor to climate change, responsible for a significant share of the climate disruption people are already experiencing. That is because it is 82.5 times more potent than carbon dioxide at absorbing the sun’s heat and warming the Earth, over the short term.

    Climate scientist have found that methane emissions from the oil and gas industry are far worse than what companies are reporting, despite claims by major companies that they’ve reduced their emissions.

    Scientists measuring methane from satellites in space have found that emissions from oil and gas operations are usually at least twice as high as what the companies reported, said Thomas Lauvaux, climate scientist at University of Reims in France.

    Many of those so-called leaks are not accidental. Companies release the gas during routine maintenance. Lauvaux and other scientists observed more than 1,500 major methane leaks globally, and potentially tens of thousands of smaller leaks, using satellites, he said.

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    AP reporters Patrick Whittle contributed from Portland, Maine, Seth Borenstein from Washington, DC., and Cathy Bussewitz from New York.

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    Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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