Andy Bunn, an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences at Western Washington University, participated this summer in the Polaris Project in the Siberian arctic. It was the second consecutive summer that Bunn took a pair of WWU undergraduates on the summer research project to study the effects of climate change on these ecologically vital and sensitive areas.

Andy Bunn, an assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Sciences at Western Washington University, participated this summer in the Polaris Project in the Siberian arctic. It was the second consecutive summer that Bunn took a pair of WWU undergraduates on the summer research project to study the effects of climate change on these ecologically vital and sensitive areas.

Bunn and the undergraduates, Kayla Henson of Spokane and Max Janicek of Golden, Colo., left for Siberia July 2.

At least three times in the last 7,500 years (the blink of an eye in geologic time) the Boulder Creek Fault in Whatcom County has produced earthquakes that were probably stronger than California’s Northridge ‘quake in 1994 – and Western Washington University Professor of Geology Liz Schermer wants to know more.

One of the keys to understanding our quickly changing global climate is to know how fast climate has changed in the past – answers locked within the rings of the world’s longest-lived organisms, the bristlecone pine.

Andrew Bunn, an assistant professor in Western Washington University’s Huxley College of the Environment, is researching the pines – which can live to be up to 5,000 years old – in their natural habitat atop California’s White Mountains, near the Nevada-California border.