Famous People
This 26th president of the United States prioritized conservation by establishing national parks, forests, and monuments to preserve U.S. natural resources.
Who is Theodore Roosevelt?
The Grand Canyon, the star feature of Grand Canyon National Park in Arizona, was formed by erosion from this river.
What is the Colorado River?
This country emits the most greenhouse gases in the entire world, accounting for over 30% of the global total.
What is China?
What was the Department of Chemical Engineering recently renamed as?
What is the Department of Chemical and Sustainability Engineering?
This state is under the greatest threat from wildfires.
What is California?
This famous Australian conservationist, zookeeper, and wildlife photographer, who has followed in his late father’s career path, has been in the news lately for his participation in this season of Dancing With the Stars.
Who is Robert Irwin?
The last time you could walk from South America to Africa was over 200 Million years ago before this supercontinent broke up.
What is Pangea?
These microscopic, photosynthetic algae are primarily responsible for the ocean’s ability to store carbon dioxide by absorbing most of the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
What is phytoplankton?
Name three different sustainability groups on campus, besides Grassroots and SESS.
What are the Food Recovery Network, Sustainability Office, Sustainability through Engineering, EcoReps, UR Bee Campus?
Enacted by President Richard Nixon in 1973, this law is primarily focused on protecting and conserving imperiled species in the United States.
What is The Endangered Species Act?
This famous primatologist, anthropologist, and conservationist, known for having studied the social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees for over 60 years and campaigning for animal welfare issues, recently passed early this month.
Who was Jane Goodall?
After seeing that some of the continents fit together like puzzle pieces, early 20th century scientist Alfred Wegener proposed this theory, which received much criticism at the time.
What is Continental Drift?
What are the five layers of the Earth’s atmosphere?
What are the Troposphere, Stratosphere, Mesosphere, Thermosphere, and Exosphere?
What rating did the University of Rochester get on its most recent Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STAR), a framework that allows colleges and universities to measure and report their sustainability performance? (Hint: Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze, Reporter)
What is Silver?
Triggered by a magnitude 9.0 earthquake and a massive tsunami, this 2011 nuclear accident in Japan caused meltdowns at three reactors of the Daiichi Power Plant.
What is the Fukushima Triple Disaster (3/11)?
This film from 2000 starring Julia Roberts is a dramatized retelling of a legal case against the Pacific Gas and Electric Company over its liability for the Hinkley groundwater contamination incident
Who is Erin Brockovich?
This mineral is the hardest naturally occurring material, one of the solid forms of the element carbon, and can be made from graphite.
What is a Diamond?
This climate change feedback loop is one of the primary reasons why Antarctica and the Arctic are rapidly melting.
What is the ice-albedo feedback loop?
This building on River Campus has approximately 960 solar panels on its roof.
What is the Goergen Athletic Center?
This European country became the first in the world to ban supermarkets from throwing away and destroying unsold food, requiring them to donate it instead.
What is France?
This famous conservationist and marine biologist is best known for launching the modern environmental movement with her 1962 book Silent Spring.
Who was Rachel Carson?
This scale was the first widely used scale to measure earthquakes, using the amplitude of the largest recorded wave and distance from the center of the earthquake.
What is the Richter scale?
This type of marine organism lives in intertidal rock pools and was the subject of Robert T. Paine’s experiments that led him to coin the term “keystone species.”
What are sea stars (Pisaster ochraceus)?
Name 3 major events that the Sustainability Office hosts every year.
What are E-Cycle Day, Earth Week, Campus Race to Zero Waste, Eyeglasses Collection, Shredfest, Sustainability Hackathon, and Move-in/Move-out waste management programs?
A potential collapse of this global ocean circulation system, driven by temperature and salinity gradients, could drastically alter climate patterns across Europe and North America.
What is the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC)?