Environment

Centralia, Pa., sits above rich subterranean coal seams, which made the town a mining center for about a century. In 1962, the seams were accidentally ignited by burning garbage, turning the coal from a commodity into a liability. Driven away by fire-associated hazards and particulate air pollution, all but a few human residents have long since abandoned the town. However, a new study reveals that the same isn’t true for all forms of life: A diverse population of microbial life resides in Centralia’s hot soils. These heat-tolerant microbes are offering scientists novel insights into the composition and character of soil microbial communities and resilience in response to dramatic ecosystem change.

When David Wilcots was 4 years old, his parents took him to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City where he encountered his first giant dinosaur skeleton: a roughly 27-meter-long sauropod named Apatosaurus (though at the time it was still popularly known as Brontosaurus). “That just blew my mind,” he remembers. His passion for paleontology grew, branching from dinosaurs into early mammals, and led him to major in geology at Temple University in Philadelphia. In 1988, he earned a master’s in geology at Fort Hays State University in Kansas. But then, things didn’t go as planned. “When I got out of grad school, I looked for jobs in paleo, but couldn’t find any,” he recalls. “Environmental geology was the next best thing.” He began consulting with business and government agencies, and as time went on, his second choice of career grew on him.

Are science and technology enemies of the environment, or can they help us effectively and sustainably manage it?

Roughly 30 percent of the global population — or about 2.2 billion people — lives in water-stressed parts of the world, where high freshwater withdrawals endanger ecosystems, agriculture and drinking-water supplies. If current population and water usage trends persist, this fraction could rise to about one-half by the century’s end. In a recent study, researchers — taking a page from the climate-change mitigation literature — have proposed a “wedge” approach to address global water stress, laying out how various tactics could ease the growing problem.