Earth & Space
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‘It was a matter of time’: Pacifica Pier’s future uncertain as emergency repairs begin
“Anything we put in the water is going to fail over time,” said Gary Griggs, professor of earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz. “Pacifica, if it was (built) in ’73 and that’s now 50 years ago, it was a matter of time.”
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Where Did Earth Get Its Oceans? Maybe It Made Them Itself.
Other scientists agree that some amount of water could have formed on Earth — but perhaps not nearly enough to produce its oceans. “I’d say it’s certainly possible that some water could be generated by reaction with hydrogen early on,” said Quentin Williams, an experimental geophysicist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “How much…
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Seymour Marine Discovery Center to open first new exhibit in 15 years
See More HQ is the center’s bilingual interactive “control room,” bringing real-time UC Santa Cruz coastal research to the public. Also in Lookout Santa Cruz.
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Lovers Point Beach closure extended after dead whale washes ashore
A coordinated response is now underway following the stranding of the deceased humpback whale, led by the Marine Mammal Stranding Network at UC Santa Cruz’s Long Marine Laboratory and Moss Landing Marine Laboratories, in partnership with the City of Pacific Grove, Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station, NOAA Fisheries and other local partners.
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The Magic of Seabird Colonies, and One Scientist’s Unique Way to Mitigate the Crises They Face
I was feeling down about it, but luckily, I had an upcoming call with Aspen Ellis. Ellis is a PhD candidate at the University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) who has studied seabirds for more than a decade. When I mentioned this issue, she knew it all too well.
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Yosemite National Park’s permissive new fishing policies spark controversy
Devon Pearse, an ecology professor at UC Santa Cruz and lead scientist at the California nonprofit Friends of the River who has previously studied Yosemite’s trout, told SFGATE that he’s skeptical the decision was based on science, and suspects instead it was likely politically motivated. In recent weeks, President Donald Trump signed an executive order…
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UCSC and NASA team up to launch new educational and career-development program
The University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) is teaming up with NASA to launch a program that creates educational and career development opportunities for students. The program is in collaboration with the Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in Mountain View. The agreement, which runs through December 2028, will see both institutions develop new research…
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NASA’s Webb telescope discovers a planet where rock clouds vanish every night
“With the Hubble telescope, when we used to do this type of observation, we got an average view of the whole planet with data from the clouds and the atmosphere squished together and indistinguishable,” said first author Sagnick Mukherjee, a postdoctoral fellow at Arizona State University who was a student at Johns Hopkins and UC…
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California’s salmon fishery is reopening after a population crash led to a 3‑year closure, but that doesn’t mean all is well
Written by UC Santa Cruz’s Eric Palkovacs (professor of ecology and evolutionary biology; director of the Institute of Marine Sciences) and Steven Lindley (Fisheries Collaborative Program researcher)
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How damaged is Angeles Crest Highway? I hiked it to find out
“If our storm and other conditions were normal, we would expect closures and losses at some points,” said Michael Beck, director of UC Santa Cruz’s Center for Coastal Climate Resilience.
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Have astronomers spotted an exploding primordial star?
“It’d be great if it’s true, and it might be,” says Stan Woosley, a theorist at the University of California, Santa Cruz who has played a key role in developing models of pair-instability supernovae. Detecting even one such bright example corresponding to a star at the heavy end of the mass range would imply that…
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Deep space photography to go on view at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History
A selection of celestial photographs will be on the display in the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History’s atrium starting Thursday. The gallery is a collaboration between the museum and UC Santa Cruz’s Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics.