Environment

  • Microbe chews through PFAS and other tough contaminants

    Friday, Sep 20, 2019
    by John Sullivan, Office of Engineering Communications
    Researcher with lab vials

    In a series of lab tests, a relatively common soil bacterium has demonstrated its ability to break down the difficult-to-remove class of pollutants called PFAS, researchers at Princeton University said.

    The bacterium, Acidimicrobium bacterium A6, removed 60% of PFAS — specifically perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) — in lab vials over 100 days of observation, the researchers reported in an article in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

  • Controlling methane is a fast and critical way to slow global warming, say Princeton experts

    Thursday, Sep 19, 2019
    by Steven Schultz, Office of Engineering Communications
    Truck parked in grass

    In independent studies, two Princeton University research teams recently identified surprisingly large sources of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, being leaked into the atmosphere. Pound for pound, methane causes a far greater warming effect in the atmosphere than does carbon dioxide — 86-fold more heating over 20 years, and 35-fold more over the course of a century.

  • Princeton collaborators bring layered approach to coastal resiliency in New York City

    Monday, Sep 16, 2019
    by Steven Schultz, Office of Engineering Communications
    Aerial image of Jamaica Bay, New York

    As a microcosm of the challenges facing coastal cities around the world, New York’s Jamaica Bay pretty much has it all.

    Home to about 3 million people, one of the world's busiest airports and sensitive coastal ecosystems, Jamaica Bay is a lagoon bordered by Brooklyn and Queens at the southwestern edge of Long Island. This region is vulnerable to an evolving set of threats, including sea-level rise, increasingly intense storms and shifting rainfall patterns.

  • New ‘All for Earth’ podcast addresses environmental issues, solutions

    Thursday, Sep 12, 2019
    by Morgan Kelly, Princeton Environmental Institute
    All for Earth logo. 

    The new Princeton University podcast “All for Earth” delves into the urgency of today’s environmental crises — as well as the effectiveness of the tools we already have to mitigate them — through in-depth interviews with the people leading the race against time to prevent the implosion of the interconnected systems that support life on Earth.

  • Solutions to urban heat differ between tropical and drier climes

    Wednesday, Sep 4, 2019
    by Molly Sharlach, Office of Engineering Communications
    Earth map with dots showing temperature data

    In summer heat, cities may swelter more than nearby suburbs and rural areas. And while the size of this urban heat island effect varies widely among the world’s cities, heat island intensity can largely be explained by a city’s population and precipitation level, researchers reported in a paper published Sept. 4 in the journal Nature.

  • '100-year' floods will happen every one to 30 years, according to new coastal flood prediction maps

    Tuesday, Aug 27, 2019
    by Jen A. Miller for the Office of Engineering Communications
    Map showing flood zones

    A 100-year flood is supposed to be just that: a flood that occurs once every 100 years, or a flood that has a 1% chance of happening every year.

    But Princeton researchers have developed new maps that predict coastal flooding for every county on the Eastern and Gulf Coasts and find 100-year floods could become annual occurrences in New England; and happen every one to 30 years along the southeast Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico shorelines.

  • When will we observe significant changes in the ocean due to climate change? New study offers road map

    Monday, Aug 19, 2019
    by Catherine Zandonella, Office of the Dean for Research
    Birdseye view of ocean

    Sea temperature and ocean acidification have climbed during the last three decades to levels beyond what is expected due to natural variation alone, a new study led by Princeton researchers finds. Meanwhile other impacts from climate change, such as changes in the activity of ocean microbes that regulate the Earth’s carbon and oxygen cycles, will take several more decades to a century to appear. The report was published Aug. 19 online in the journal Nature Climate Change.

  • Offshore oil and gas rigs leak more greenhouse gas than expected

    Thursday, Aug 15, 2019
    by John Sullivan, Office of Engineering Communications
    Offshore installation and ship

    A survey of offshore installations extracting oil and natural gas in the North Sea revealed far more leakage of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, than currently estimated by the British government, according to a research team led by scientists from Princeton University.

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