In the Media

“When humans make changes, anything that kinda disturbs the watershed, those activities have the potential to release sediment, that can run off into the lake. That sediment often contains pretty high levels of phosphorus,” Angela Strecker, director of the Western Washington University Institute for Watershed Studies, told The Bellingham Herald. “There are potential other sources ... but human conversion of land is one of the main sources ... the lake sits at the lowest point of the watershed, so anything that happens in that watershed is gonna get funneled down to the lake. The lake takes the brunt of all the things that we do, all the actions that we take within the watershed.”

The well-situated seismometer first came to public attention in January 2011, when it recorded the response of fans of the Seattle Seahawks, an American football team, to a magnificent touchdown by Marshawn Lynch, a running back known as “Beast Mode”. The “Beast Quake” went down in local sporting history. When Ms Swift came to town for two nights of her Eras tour, Jacqueline Caplan-Auerbach, a geology professor at Western Washington University, used the opportunity to learn more about how events in the stadium shake its surroundings. On December 11th she presented some of her conclusions at the American Geophysical Union’s autumn meeting in San Francisco.

Washington State’s Emergency Management Division calculates that nearly 90,000 people live or work in the outer coast’s inundation zone, and there are another 86,000 more along inner waterways that the waves will take longer to reach. On a summer day, they could be joined in the danger zone by up to 248,000 sightseers, clam diggers and other visitors. Western Washington University’s Resilience Institute has calculated that as many as 28 percent would be unable to reach higher ground in time to escape the tsunami and 18 percent — up to 60,000 people — would be crushed or swept out to sea.

A Seattle seismologist found the crowd's dancing mixed with the booming speakers at Lumen Field caused seismic activity on par with a 2.3 magnitude earthquake. Jackie Caplan-Auerbach, a seismologist and geology professor at Western Washington University, discovered the "Swift Quake." In 2011, running back Marshawn Lynch's scored a touchdown causing the "Beast Shake," which compared to a 2.0 magnitude earthquake.

Kaiser Borsari Hall has topped out at the Western Washington University campus in Bellingham. When completed, the four-story, approximately 54,000-square-foot building will be the new home for the university's electrical engineering, computer science, and energy science and technology programs. It will also be the region's first carbon net-neutral collegiate facility.

Researchers at Western Washington University are looking to collect stories from residents along our northern border about life during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Western’s Border Policy Research Institute was created to inform our local policy-makers on matters concerning the border with Canada.

Voter turnout for this November’s election was the lowest on record for a general election in Washington state history, according to a Seattle Times analysis of election data from the Secretary of State’s Office.

Nearly two-thirds of registered voters did not turn in ballots, leaving turnout at less than 37%, the lowest recorded since reliable voter registration counts began in 1936. That continues a trend for odd-year elections observed since 2015, when voter turnout first fell below 40%. 

State law requires that city and local district elections are held in odd-numbered years. Federal and state races occur in even-numbered years. Buoyed by the lackluster turnout for this latest election, some state lawmakers are trying to revive a bill that would let cities have their elections in even years.

The absence of statewide ballot measures this year may be connected to the drop in voter turnout, said Todd Donovan, a political-science professor at Western Washington University and longtime observer of state politics.

International trade has shaped the world for much of the past century. Countries benefited from the global flow of goods, and the world became richer and safer. At the same time, many Americans lost their jobs to cheaper overseas competitors. Now, a series of compounding challenges, including great power competition and climate change, have led U.S. officials to rethink trade policy. What's next for international trade? And can the United States retain the benefits of trade while protecting critical supply chains and fighting climate change?

According to Myron Shekelle, a biology instructor and researcher at Western Washington University, this absence of the reflective layer in the tarsier’s eyes offers some insight into the evolution of primates.

He stated that tarsiers may have once been diurnal primates, which means they were active during the day, so they had no need for the reflective layer in their eyes. Somewhere along the line, they reversed course and became nocturnal again, but they had already lost their reflective layer.

We often think of volcanoes as skyscraping marvels, but these portals to the geologic underworld also reside underwater. Unfortunately, submarine volcanoes are trickier to study than their terrestrial siblings. But you would be hard-pressed to find anyone more enchanted by them — and more stubbornly determined to study them — than Jackie Caplan-Auerbach.

A volcanologist at Western Washington University, Caplan-Auerbach is also a seismologist, someone who uses the jiggles of earthquakes to understand geophysics. And it just so happens that active volcanoes are prodigious earthquake producers; they make as much seismic noise as they can muster. For Caplan-Auerbach, that noise is music to her scientific ears — data that can be used to learn about the internal workings of our planet.