View from the NOAA Pacific Grove lab

In a future post, I’ll write more about upwelling and how it might be changing under a warming world. Today I’m focused on an entirely different threat to ocean health: plastic trash that makes its way from land to sea in seemingly overwhelming abundance. At the NOAA lab, we met an evangelist for this environmental issue, Captain Charles Moore who discovered firsthand what became knows as the “great Pacific garbage patch” on a yacht race from Hawaii to mainland U.S. in 1997. The sight of “shampoo caps and soap bottles and plastic bags and fishing floats as far as I could see” stunned Capt. Moore and compelled him to focus his marine research foundation Algalita on bringing public and scientific awareness to this looming environmental and ecological disaster.

Unlike paper and other biodegradable packaging, discarded plastic persists in marine and aquatic environments, collecting along beaches and in rivers, lakes, and the ocean. In some regions of the world, including the Pacific, Atlantic, and Indian Oceans, plastic is swept into circular currents called gyres where the trash swirls in giant eddies twice the size of Texas.

NOAA map of the Pacific Grye, a region of the subtropical Pacific where marine debris accumulates.

A self-described pessimist (he doesn’t say cleaning up this mess is impossible but does say it’s “really, really, really hard…”) CAPT Moore gave a recent TED talk that’s sobering but well worth watching. But not all the news is hopeless: there’s a multi-institutional program in Hawaii that collects plastic waste and transports it to a power plants that burns the waste for energy production. Another cool idea we heard yesterday: enlist the efforts of the Bering Sea crab fishermen to collect abandoned fishing nets and other large debris during their off season. From deadliest catch to yuckiest catch?? Might make a good reality show…what new disgusting thing will they pull out of the water this week?

But as CAPT. Moore points out we should be finding ways to cut this off at the source. Even though I recycle, I keep finding more reasons to reconsider every product I buy packaged in plastic. In celebration of World Ocean Day, today and for the rest of this week, I’m going to avoid buying or throwing away anything made of plastic.

You may have noticed that I’ve been pretty light on my blog posts the last nine months or so. That’s because I’ve been consumed with our Web project, Ice Stories. Just about a year ago, we got funding from the National Science Foundation to do this International Polar Year education project and it’s been non-stop polar research and education since then. We did a full slate of Webcasts last winter from Antarctica and trained some young Arctic researchers in media production and story-telling this past March. We gave them cameras and asked them to post dispatches, video and pictures from their research camps in Alaska and Greenland. We also sent an Exploratorium media crew to Barrow in May and June to produce Webcasts and stories from this science outpost on the northern-most spit of land in the U.S.

Now it’s my turn for a polar expedition and we’re going to Greenland starting July 7. Summer is an intense time for science in Greenland. With 24 hours of daylight and a melting ice cap to study, researchers spread along the edges of glaciers and on camps atop the summit of the ice cap to learn all they can about the dynamic nature of ice, wildlife, climate, and geology in an era of rapid climate change at the poles. I’ll be up there with video production Lisa Strong to document all the science we can stuff into three weeks. We’ll be camping and hiking with glaciologists, biologists, and climate researchers, recording interviews, writing dispatches, and capturing moving and still image scenes of this gorgeous icy island.

Our first stop will be the town of Kangerlussuaq, nestled along a 160-km (100-mile) long fjord with the looming ice cap behind. We’ll reach Kanger, as it’s often called, via an Air National Guard military transport from Scotia, New York and we’ll be staying at the Kangerlussuaq International Science Support facility, aka “KISS.” We hope to catch up with Billy D’Andrea, our Ice Stories correspondent from Brown University, who is studying lake sediments for clues of our recent climate past. We also plan to hitch a ride and hike out to Tom Neumann’s camp along the glacier edge. Tom is a glaciologist from the University of Vermont (http://www.uvm.edu/~greenlnd/) who is interested in the history of the Greenland Ice Sheet, in particular the last time Greenland was free from its mantle of ice. His team does this by patrolling the edge of the glacier and collecting debris spit out from the base of the ice sheet. These rocks contain clues about the last time they were directly exposed to cosmic rays from the sun (i.e. the last time they weren’t covered by ice). Near Kanger, we also hope to capture some musk oxen with our cameras and will almost certainly encounter unwelcome wildlife in the form of marauding Arctic mosquitoes (Billy says we’ll be eaten alive, which is why we’ve packed mosquito nets and plenty of deet).

From Kanger, we fly to the lovely town of Ilulissat, a major tourist and science destination on the island. Ilulissat means iceberg in Greenlandic and the town is aptly named situated as it is near the outlet of the world’s fastest-moving glacier, the Jakobshavn. Jakobshavn is Greenland’s largest glacier and it regularly calves huge icebergs in the summer season, some as large as a cubic kilometer is size. We hope to capture one of these gigantic calving events at Mark Fahnestock’s camp along the rocky shoreline of Disko Bay at the base of the glacier. Mark is a glaciologist from the University of New Hampshire, and studies the flow rate of the Jakobshavn glacier. This one glacier, a fraction of the 630,000-cubic-mile ice sheet that covers most of Greenland, produces 35 billion tons of icebergs every year, nearly all the bergs that threaten ship traffic in the Northern Atlantic and almost certainly the origin of the monster that sunk the Titanic. As a final destination of our Greenland science tour, Lisa Strong will fly with the Air National Guard up to Summit Camp to get a perspective of the ice from on top the two-mile-thick sheet.

By Kate O’Donnell

While there may not be such a thing as a ‘usual’ day at the Exploratorium, when I pulled in to work last Wednesday, I knew I was in for something different.

For one, there was a plane circling above my head towing a massive “FREE BURMA” sign. For two, every one and thing in the city was buzzing about our newly arrived guest.

San Francisco was hosting an international celebrity, one whose whereabouts were a deeply desired yet hidden secret. I’m talking, of course, about the Olympic torch.

For weeks on end it was a main topic of conversation and debate. Trying to prevent London and Paris from repeating themselves, Mayor Newsom had decided that the Olympic torch processional would be held in an undisclosed (and changed-numerous-times-at-the-last-minute) location. The protesters were outraged. The police prepared for security lockdown. And as for us here at the Exploratorium? Well, we just happened to get front row seats.

Our VIP view of the Olympic torch drama had begun earlier in the week when protesters scaled cables on the Golden Gate Bridge to hang giant “FREE TIBET” signs high in the air. Our roof cam—which lets you zoom in on different views from atop the Exploratorium—caught some great pictures of the signs going up, flying high, and being taken down by the police.

Click the picture to see a series of shots from our roof cam over the course of the morning.
To visit our roof cam, please click here.

As far as I was concerned, that would be my close-up view of the torch affair for the week. Then on Wednesday around 3pm, the hottest thing in America suddenly landed in the Exploratorium’s lap.

The surreal episode began like an African thunderstorm: first one drop, then two, then ten thousand. One minute I was crossing the street between the museum and administrative offices and it was a peaceful Marina afternoon—quiet, with a light breeze and the occasional jogger. The next minute I was reading an e-mail from a colleague across the street: “Um, there are a lot of cops over here. Like, a LOT of cops. I think the torch might be coming.”

I rushed out of the museum, but by the time I got outside the place had already undergone a major transformation. Sirens were squealing as helicopters roared overhead and hundreds of motorcycles filled the streets. What seemed like the entire San Francisco police motorcade had lined the road as far as I could see, and MUNI buses of policemen on foot were pulling in and unloading. The mayor and Chief of Police arrived just as the first protesters on wheels zoomed in with signs and megaphones. Within minutes hundreds of people were streaming in, signs and voices raised.

While San Francisco was doing its best to keep the press at bay, the headline of the week had just landed in our backyard. I was pleased and unsurprised to see fellow Exploratorium staff running out with still cameras, video cameras, and audio recorders. As the procession came by—led by an amphibious duck vehicle and featuring none other than former SF Mayor Willie Brown as torchbearer—I had to smile. The torch route may have changed numerous times, the Exploratorium staff alerted to its presence merely a minute or two ahead of time, but leave it to the Explo to still create complete documentation of the event.

Documentation, of course, to share. Below is a link to a slideshow of our collected pictures. Hopefully it can offer a fun alternative to other media coverage that, as Mary rightly put it, has been treating the Olympic torch like Princess Diana. We hope you enjoy as, in the meantime, I look forward what I’m hoping will be Elton John’s next hit: ‘Torch Flame in the Wind.’

Slideshow
For slideshow, please click here.

For months I’ve been carrying around a fuzzy little sea creature, depriving it of a rightful home among fellow reef denizens. I hate giving up the crenulated critter because it was hand made by my mother, it’s beautiful and it feels so good in the hand, like a wooly worry bead.

The blue wool sea slug was created for a community art project, called the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef. The project is the brainchild of Margaret Wertheim, a science writer and founder of the Institute for Figuring in Los Angeles. The reef project has been traveling around from city to city, most recently Manhattan where it caught the attention of a New York Times reporter.

Margaret came to the Exploratorium last July to give a workshop on hyperbolic crotchet, a method of creating mathematically complex forms using strands of wool and a crotchet hook. We also did a Webcast with Margaret about hyperbolic crotchet and her coral reef project, which was created to bring attention to the environmental threats facing the Great Barrier Reef in Margaret’s native Australia.

My mother dropped in for part of the Exploratorium workshop and made a few sea slugs, one of which I’m supposed to send to Margaret. Maybe I’ll do that if the crotchet coral reef comes to San Francisco…

The demise of the AAAS meetings have been rumored for as long as the nearly 20 years I’ve been attending them and probably even before then. Journalists grump that there’s not enough breaking news, scientists say not enough of their colleagues attend, organizers fret that the registration numbers are flat even as other more specialized science meetings have mushroomed in recent years. An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about this year’s conference rehashes the old debate, with no news of its own to contribute.

But I love AAAS, for its science celebrities, its smorgasborg of different disciplines, its parties and networking opportunities, and the meeting’s focus on science policy and public engagement. The organizers take all these things seriously and the results are a unique cross-roads of science and society that seem ever more relevant to those of us who love research and want to share it with our audiences. I collect business cards, brainstorm new ideas with colleagues, recruit scientists to visit and give talks at the Exploratorium, and dance at the annual science writer party (this being Boston it was held at Fenway Park with a fantastic Motown cover band).

This year I got to see, if not shake hands with, Ken Miller of Brown (one of the witnesses in the victorious evolution trials of Dover, Pennsylvania and recipient of the Exploratorium’s outstanding educator award), Barry Barrish (founding directors of LIGO and now heading up the troubled but not abandoned International Linear Collider), Lawrence Krauss (theoretical physicist and author of “The Physics of Star Trek”), Dan Gilbert (Harvard psychology professor, author of Stumbling on Happiness and son of Walter Gilbert, who we interviewed during our DNA webcasts), and Andy Revkin (NYTimes climate reporter and blogger).

I attended sessions on the climate history of the Arctic, global warming and the media, memory and imagination, gigantic international physics collaborations, and science in a religious America. The latter was organized by our friend Matthew Nisbet of American University and he put together a stellar panel of folks in the large middle ground of the debate where most people live. Matt and the panelists don’t feel that religion undermines science, and argued that both can co-exist in modern society, if not the hearts and minds of some scientists and Catholics. Of course that means he’s attacked by people on the edges: the “new atheists” who feel that religious thought should never be tolerated, but rather should be campaigned against by the educated (their words) and religious fundamentalists and politicians who say that accepting evolution means that humans have no moral foundation on which to stand. All did agree that Intelligent Design isn’t based on evidence and therefor isn’t science and that only evolution should be taught in biology classrooms. So that is the bright shining line that even tolerant scientists won’t tolerate.

No, this isn’t a dire climate prediction from one of Al Gore’s disciples. This description was of the Arctic’s distant past given by a paleo-oceanographer during the annual American Association for the Advancement of Science, being held this year in Boston (brrr, baby it’s cold outside). This particular scientist, Henk Brinkhuis from Utrecht University in The Netherlands, also said that 50 million years ago the Arctic was “stinky, swampy and freaking warm.”

Scientists know this because a few years ago an international consortium mounted the first ever deep ocean drilling expedition to the ice-covered Arctic Ocean. The ice-breaking drill ship pulled up sediment cores that represent climate history back to a time when Earth was a “greenhouse world” with no ice caps at the poles. Their 2004 expedition is written up in the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) website. It was actually a feat to drill through thick sea ice to the ocean floor below and it took three ice breakers to do the job: a nuclear icebreaker from Russia to break up the floes, a Swedish ice breaker to grind them into slush, and a third ship to deploy the drill string.

Sediment cores are a time machine, scientists pore over the mud looking for fossil fragments, ancient microbes, pollen, and other pieces of evidence that give clues about the temperatures of the ocean and atmosphere. We know from the ANDRILL sediment coring project in Antarctica, covered in our Ice Stories website, diatoms and other plankton are good indicators of past climate because they are very particular about the environments they live in, including the temperature of the water.

Scientists at the session were quick to say that they don’t expect palm trees and crocodiles anytime soon in the Arctic. In fact, from these ocean cores it appears that ice started forming 40 million years ago, shortly after the maximum warm period, and as been an important climate driver in the Arctic Ocean since then. With recent thinning and changing sea ice cover around the North Pole, Kate Moran, a leader on the arctic drilling expedition, said “As scientists, it’s important to point out the issues that demontrate the vulnerability of our planet, that we could destroy this in 200 years.”

photo credit:
H Pälike © ECORD/IODP

Maybe you noticed I haven’t been posting lately; the last few months have been a blur as the Explo team, with fresh funding from the National Science Foundation, launched a major Web project about polar research. Called Ice Stories it features the research of scientists working in the Arctic and Antarctic. We launched the site last November and equipped some Antarctic scientists with video cameras to document their work and send back dispatches.

We got first-hand reports about flooding of penguin nests from melting glaciers in the Ross Sea, heard a raging storm from a glacier camp in West Antarctica, and, in a live webcast, spoke with scientists collecting sediment cores at a sea-ice drilling camp out of McMurdo Station.

What’s really wonderful about Ice Stories is the personal connection with scientists working in such remote, challenging field sites. It’s a thrill to get a call from a glaciologist in the middle of Antarctica updating us about a close encounter with an ice crevasse (her exact quote: “one of our team discovered a crevasse with his foot”). The combination of adventure and current research in these ongoing narratives gives a real picture of what it’s like to be a polar scientist. In most cases, they’ll tell you it’s just plain fun.

The New York Times had a story in the Science Times today that made me flinch at first. A scientist from the Jet Propulsion Lab decided to test NASA’s clean rooms—labs where the air is filtered and employees wear sterile “bunny suits” and masks to prevent contamination of equipment and vehicles intended for space travel– to see whether these environments might harbor life forms of their own. NASA found a surprise: lots of very hardy bacteria–including species previously unknown to science–find a way to survive in the clean rooms.

The reason I flinched is that we did a live Webcast from Goddard Space Flight Center a few years ago as part of our Origins project. I spent a lot of time in the NASA center’s giant clean room, alongside new cameras and a full-scale model of the Hubble Space Telescope, filming and interviewing engineers and technicians as they prepared equipment for a space shuttle servicing mission of the telescope. Did I get exposed to some super-hardy dangerous microbe? Such is the stuff of science-fiction fantasies.

Well, NASA is a lot more concerned about contaminating planets and other space environments with its space vehicles than with sickening the earth-bound humans visiting clean rooms but it seems there wasn’t much for me to worry about anyway. The so-called extreme organisms survive on trace nutrients in the air and unlikely surfaces such as paint. By just playing with an Exploratorium exhibit this morning, I was exposed to many more bacterial species that thrive on human skin and in our bodies. Come to think of it, I’ll go wash my hands now, just to be on the safe side.

Global warming has been called, with good reason, the biggest environmental challenge the world has ever faced and the bad news about the impacts of climate change just keeps piling up. Summer arctic sea ice is disappearing faster than even the most pessimistic scientists ever predicted, villages in Alaska are tumbling into the sea, the beloved polar bear is at risk of extinction and Adelie penguin populations on the Antarctic Peninsula have been declining as temperatures there have risen an average of 6 degrees Celsius in the winter.

The losses are mounting, but is there good news for some? Anyone who has read Andrew Revkin’s series of stories about the land rush in the Arctic knows that some oil and shipping interests will benefit from an opening of the fabled Northwest passage across the Arctic Ocean. (However, these short-term gains will inevitably lead to long-term losses by the rest of the human and natural world as NCAR’s Michael Glantz so eloquently writes about in his blog Fragile Ecologies).

But did you know that residents of Greenland can now enjoy locally grown potatoes and brocolli? And that in the Ross Sea region of Antarctica, Adelie penguin populations are actually increasing, unlike the penguins of the Antarctic peninsula? That was the subject of a recent talk at the Exploratorium by David Ainley, a biologist who has been studying the intrepid Adelie penguin for nearly thirty years and reports on his research in the Penguin Science website.

The story, David says, is more complex than the view that a warming earth melts ice and destroys the habitat for all animals that live on or near frozen sea or ground. In reality, global warming does more than melt ice and heat up the air, it also changes wind patterns which can affect the extent and movement of floating sea ice. For Adelies, which nest on bare rock near the coast, increasing winds push sea ice farther offshore and give the penguins access to ocean feeding grounds without having to walk across kilometers of ice. That makes them better able to feed their chicks, increases reproductive success and has meant a steadily rising population of Adelie penguins in Eastern Antarctica. At the same time, this loss of sea ice threatens the Emperor Penguin, the heroes of “March of the Penguin” and “Happy Feet.” These large birds need a stable platform of sea ice to lay their eggs and hatch chicks. They do this in winter, rather than summer, and the caretakers do not return to sea while they are raising chicks, as the Adelie penguins do. Emperor penguins are vulnerable to shifting sea ice and have suffered population declines as much as 50% as increasing winds have destabilized their breeding habitat and swept chicks and eggs out to sea. The very bad news for Emperor Penguins is that climate models are forecasting even stronger winds in a warming Antarctica, making them climate losers.

I’m starting to really love Web 2.0 although I have much to learn about how to really become part of the community. And admittedly, I haven’t gotten much feedback from folks who are on the nastier side, maybe I wouldn’t like it so much if I did.

But I love the positive, decidedly unnasty vibes from the many science bloggers out there. There was a wonderfully rich post on the Cocktail Party Physics blog about the Exploratorium and our Iron Science Teacher Webcasts that we hold during the Summer Institute for middle and high school science teachers. We’ve been holding these competitions since 1999 and they’ve gotten quite popular on the Web (with lots of hits from Japan where its inspiration “Iron Chef” originated). I met the energetic and passionate blog author, Jennifer Oullette at a recent science communication conference in Lincoln Nebraska of all places. She gave an inspiring talk about how to get young women interested in physics by leveraging from popular culture. She wrote the book “Physics of the Buffyverse,” and has done talks using karate masters demonstrating the laws of motion. That’s the kind of creative educational approach we need more of to expand the appetite for science to new young audiences.