News
23 April 2015
<p>The 2010 BP oil spill left an oily "bathtub ring" on the sea floor roughly the size of Rhode Island, according to a new study.</p>
<p>The rig blew on April 20, 2010, and spewed 172 million gallons of oil into the Gulf through the summer. Scientists are still trying to...
23 April 2015
<p>The Deepwater Horizon event was a national tragedy: 11 workers killed in a blowout, an ecosystem inundated with oil and the livelihoods of many in the Gulf states disrupted. In a response effort of unparalleled scale, a diverse group of independent scientists ventured into the domain of...
23 April 2015
<p>For the most part, evolution seems a lot like a lottery of mutations. The winners get to survive, reproduce, and eventually evolve. The losers disappear from all but the fossil record. Now new research has revealed that a small group of microbes and viruses are apparently cheating the...
20 April 2015
<p>Five years ago today, the Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. Since then, scientists have continued to study the effects of the largest environmental disaster in the history of the petroleum industry.</p>
<p>UC Santa Barbara research oceanographer...
15 April 2015
<p>The common hippopotamus can spend up to 16 hours a day immersed in rivers and lakes. Lumbering out of the water at night, these herbivores graze on tropical grasses and consume 80 to 100 pounds in one meal.</p>
<p>By daybreak, having eaten their fill, they return to their...
6 April 2015
<p>With one of the highest-quality climate and environmental archives in the world’s oceans, the Santa Barbara Basin presents the ideal natural laboratory for researchers studying the global climate record on a variety of time scales, from last year to a million years ago. That’s according to...
23 March 2015
<p>Many strange creatures live in the deep sea, but few are odder than archaea, primitive single-celled bacteria-like microorganisms. Archaea go to great lengths — eating methane or breathing sulfur or metal instead of oxygen — to thrive in the most extreme environments on the planet.</p...
10 March 2015
<p>The relationship between human disease and environmental management has been the subject of extensive research, especially given the recent outbreaks of Ebola, SARS and other zoonotic infectious diseases that transmit from animals to humans.</p>
<p>The fieldwork of UC Santa...
26 February 2015
<p>UC Santa Barbara’s Douglas McCauley has been selected to receive a 2015 Sloan Research Fellowship. Awarded annually since 1955 by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the fellowships honor early-career scientists and scholars whose achievements and potential identify them as rising stars, the...
25 February 2015
<p>As ocean acidification and warming continue to increase due to climate change, how will California fisheries respond? UC Santa Barbara’s Gretchen Hofmann is looking to answer that question. She is one of seven recipients of a California Sea Grant Core Award from the National Oceanic and...