Climate Change

A team of researchers from ETH Zurich and WSL travelled to Svalbard this summer to take a closer look at the phenomenon of Arctic greening. Lead principal investigator Sebastian Doetterl discusses research in the face of polar bears, airline strikes and war.

EPFL researchers have shown that people’s perception of office temperature can vary considerably. Personalized climate control could therefore help enhance workers’ comfort – and save energy at the same time.

Researchers from ETH Zurich have established that the destruction of ozone over the Arctic in the spring causes abnormal weather throughout the northern hemisphere, with many places being warmer and drier than average – or too wet.

Since the last ice age, chamois have colonised ever-higher altitudes. This is the result of a study by the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research WSL, in which researchers combined genetic information on the animals with computer models. The resulting simulations could also reveal how the animals react to progressive climate warming in the future.

Since the 1990s, Valais and other dry Alpine valleys have seen repeated mass diebacks of Scots pines. Oddly, however, the amount of precipitation in the all-important summer months has not decreased at all over this period. WSL researchers have now found an explanation.

Cryospheric ecosystems are some of the oldest on the planet. EPFL scientists have found that the microorganisms living in them have a unique genetic signature. They performed an inventory of the microorganisms in these ecosystems and complied the information into a database, which will be a useful resource for future studies on climate change microbiology.