One of those hypotheses — that family bonds play into the stranding phenomenon — is now subject to question, based on genetic analysis of hundreds of beached whales in New Zealand and Australia. The mothers of beached calves, for instance, often were missing entirely from the beach, says cetacean researcher Scott Baker, associate director of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State. Given whales’ strong kinship bonds, this familial separation could signal some disruption prior to the stranding — a disruption that could, in fact, play a role in triggering the event.

“Rescue efforts aimed at ‘refloating’ stranded whales often focus on placing stranded calves with the nearest mature female” on the assumption she’s the mother, Baker says. “Our results suggest that rescuers should be cautious when making difficult welfare decisions … based on this assumption alone.”

Breaking through these barriers is the intent behind a pilot project in Idaho’s Big Wood River Basin, where a diverse group of local stakeholders has been meeting regularly with OSU climate and social scientists to talk about and plan for climate-driven changes in water quality and availability. Convening and hosting this “knowledge-to-action network” is the Climate Impacts Research Consortium (CIRC) based at Oregon State. By fall, the network will have developed and analyzed alternative scenarios based on climate models, land-use practices and population growth.

Officials expect the vessels to be positioned on the East Coast, the West Coast and the Gulf Coast, depending on research needs and available funds. The 175-foot vessels will be “floating, multi-use laboratories” that are “more seaworthy and environmentally green” than previous research vessels, says Mark Abbott, dean of the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. The first ship will hit the water in 2019 or 2020.

Environmental philosopher Michael P. Nelson gamely copes with “ginormous” mosquitoes and gobs of “moose grease” as he necropsies a moose on Isle Royale in Lake Superior. (Photo: John A. Vucetich)

When Michael P. Nelson talks about his work, he mentions carcasses and cadavers to a startling degree — startling because Nelson is not a physician or a veterinarian or even a biologist. He’s a philosopher. So at first glance, necropsy seems an odd topic of discourse.  But it starts to make sense when you notice that Nelson’s office is in Oregon State’s College of Forestry, not the College of Liberal Arts where universities typically house their philosophers. And, as the only philosopher ever hired to lead one of the National Science Foundation’s 27 Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites — in this case, OSU’s H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest — Nelson again defies tradition.

“We started the search assuming we’d end up with some sort of ecologist, hydrologist or biophysical scientist,” recounts John Bliss, the associate dean of forestry who led the hiring process. “I knew we’d turned a corner when the ecologists on the committee stopped me in the hall to say things like, ‘Maybe a philosopher is what we need!’”
With -ologists already well represented, they opted instead for Nelson’s novel viewpoint. “Michael brings a philosopher’s logic to complex problems, unencumbered by disciplinary straitjackets,” Bliss says.

Mind Over Matter

To understand these discrepancies, you have to go back to Nelson’s hometown of Janesville, Wisconsin, where, in a high school anatomy class, he saw a dead body laid out on a steel slab. “I thought that cadaver was the coolest thing in the world,” he recalls. But once he got to college, the study of biology struck him as tedious. Too many equations to solve, too many chemical reactions to memorize. In contrast, he found himself relishing his philosophy classes. Ideas like the moral imperative and the inherent nature of being quickened his imagination. He soon switched majors and began to ponder the world on a cerebral rather than cellular level.

Michael P. Nelson

His fascination with biological systems, however, never went away. Eventually, this man whose mental petri dish was awash in syllogisms instead of cell divisions circled back to where he started — to that raw, physical nexus of life and death that is a carcass. It happened about a decade after he earned his Ph.D. at England’s Lancaster University, the cradle of environmental philosophy. By then, Nelson was teaching at Michigan State University, where he met John A. Vucetich, co-director of a long-term, multidisciplinary study of predator-prey dynamics. Vucetich invited Nelson to visit the study site: a wild, isolated, mist-wrapped island in Lake Superior. Nelson was enchanted. Soon he became the “resident philosopher” for Wolves and Moose of Isle Royale.

Which is how, in 2005, he came to be kneeling beside a pile of bones and sinews where wolves had devoured a moose. Every summer, Nelson participates in collecting biological samples, including scat and skulls, for DNA analysis and pathology studies. Now in its 55th year, the project has tracked the dynamics between wolves and moose over a timespan unprecedented in the annals of predator-prey studies. Surprising insights into island biogeography and wildlife management are emerging from the mists.

“What I really like about my work, is that it exists at the edges of disciplines.”

— Michael P. Nelson

Sting Like a Bee

In front of a crowd, Nelson moves nimbly, like a boxer, on the balls of his feet. An aura of great energy emanates from his face and hands. It’s clear that he’s in a hurry to push his thoughts outward. Planet Earth is, after all, poised on the cliff of calamity, he says during a joint presentation on ethics and climate change with OSU conservation philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore. He and Moore challenge the scientists in the audience to couple their facts (climate models, data sets, statistical analyses) to their values (as parents, as community members, as global citizens). It’s time to kick the advocacy taboo to the curb, the two philosophers exhort, arguing that meaningful action arises only when facts (“what is”) are welded to values (“what ought to be”).

To drive home the urgency of curbing fossil fuel use, Nelson cites sources as diverse as “Genesis” and Dr. Seuss. At last year’s meeting of LTER scientists nationwide he did a riff inspired by The Lorax. This scholar of striking contrasts can recite playful couplets one moment and the next, dare scientists to rethink the most basic assumptions of their careers.

“Look, we don’t know how to create careers in science that fully empower scientists,” Nelson tells a roomful of researchers. “What we do know is this: Everything has changed. You have taught us that. You should ask yourself some questions: Are the old forms of scientific practice working? Or do you need to create another path? What does it mean to be a scientist now? You are studying systems, ecosystems; you know about the necessity of connections. Live what you know. That’s integrity.”

____________________________

Read more

See details about Michael Nelson’s teaching, books, ongoing projects and affiliations.

Predator and Prey, a Delicate Dance, The New York Times, May 8, 2013

Wolves Teach Scientists Their Limitations, Chronicle of Higher Education, April 1, 2013

John Miedema of BioLogical Carbon Inc., Philomath, Ore., makes biochar at a wood processing plant and explains his process in this video.

Perry Morrow, student in the Oregon State University Water Resources Graduate Program, produced this video on biochar, the carbonized remains of plants. Turning low-value wood and other biomass into biochar sequesters carbon from the atmosphere for hundreds of years. The resulting material may also benefit water quality by absorbing pollutants such as copper, lead, zinc and other metals.

The caldera has generated large amounts of ash over geologic history. One 12-million-year-old deposit of Yellowstone ash at Ashfall State Park in Nebraska entombed rhinoceros, horses, camels and birds that had gathered around a watering hole and today provide paleontologists with a deep view of ancient ecology.

For links to recent scientific reports about the caldera, see this page on Volcano World at Oregon State.

Adam Schultz (Photo: Dennis Wolverton, courtesy of the Oregon Stater magazine)

A professor of geology and geophysics, Adam Schultz received his Ph.D. at the University of Washington in 1986. He came to Oregon State University in 2003 and directs the National Geoelectromagnetic Facility, which loans geophysics equipment to scientists, industry and government. His research interests include geothermal systems, the Cascade volcanic arc, the Cascadia subduction zone and innovative geophysical imaging techniques.

His research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and a variety of other federal, industry and foreign funding sources.

This 3-D view of the magmatic system beneath the Snake River Plain and Yellowstone National Park is inferred from magnetotelluric data. At each point on this surface, the magnetic field has a constant or lower value. The actual locations at which data were collected are shown by the dots on top. Yellowstone is indicated with an open circle. Note the conductive pathway to the Yellowstone caldera from beneath the eastern Snake River Plain. (Figure courtesy of Anna Kelbert. Source: Kelbert A., Egbert G.D., deGroot-Hedlin C. 2012. “Crust and upper mantle electrical conductivity beneath the Yellowstone Hotspot Track” Geology, v. 40, p. 447-450, doi:10.1130/G32655.1)

A geological mystery lies beneath the majestic beauty of Yellowstone National Park. Once thought solved, the enigma continues to unfold through the lens of a young science known as magnetotellurics.

As accepted theory goes, over the past 16 million years a rising plume of magma in the Earth’s mantle produced massive amounts of lava and ash in a path stretching from the Snake River Plain to its current caldera — a volcanic crater in Wyoming, the Yellowstone “supervolcano.” It is widely believed that the Yellowstone caldera currently sits on top of that hotspot, a vertical “blowtorch” in the mantle beneath the Earth’s crust. The North American tectonic plate slowly creeps over the plume of magma, no faster than the rate at which fingernails grow. The plume sometimes oozes and other times violently erupts lava across an area the size of Rhode Island. Adam Schultz, a geophysics professor in Oregon State University’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, describes this mantle hotspot idea as “almost a cartoon view that Earth scientists have of why you get features like Yellowstone.”

Magnetotellurics (MT), the study of the Earth’s electric and magnetic fields, may turn this cartoon view on its head. The use of magnetotelluric surveys has exploded in the last decade thanks to progress in computing technology and geophysical instrumentation. Schultz’s colleagues at Oregon State — Anna Kelbert and Gary Egbert  — have used magnetotellurics to reveal that large volumes of partially molten rock and potentially superheated water (hydrothermal systems) snake west underneath the crust and into the uppermost mantle west of Yellowstone. This molten trail continues westward along much of the Snake River Plain in Idaho and into Oregon. These findings complicate the expectation that a nearly vertical magma plume lies directly under the present day Yellowstone supervolcano, which was what is anticipated from a hotspot. Magnetotellurics has opened doors to stunning breakthroughs and fascinating discoveries, providing new perspectives that were once invisible to science.

Research assistant Tristan Peery, left, and Adam Schultz are analyzing changes in subsurface rock as part of a geothermal energy study by AltaRock, Inc. (Photo: Dennis Wolverton, courtesy of the Oregon Stater magazine)

From Magnetics to Melted Rock

With magnetotellurics, scientists measure variations in the direction and intensity of the planet’s natural magnetic and electric fields over time. They use these measurements to understand the properties of the rock, one of the most important being electrical conductivity. Generally, greater electrical conductivity can suggest the presence of extensively interconnected bodies of fluid within the rock. West of Yellowstone, magnetotellurics reveal a relatively shallow, hot, highly conductive region under the Snake River Plain.

Schultz compares magnetotelluric surveys to MRIs commonly used in medical diagnostics. In fact the underlying principles are similar. “If you go to a radiology department and they do a CT scan of your head, for example, they see some weird thing, and they’re not quite sure what it is. You have an MRI and go, ‘ah! that’s a brain tumor,’” says Schultz.

In the same way, MT can be thought of as a very large MRI. And just as doctors put together multiple types of scans to see inside our bodies, geophysicists combine seismology, magnetotellurics and measurements of the on-going deformation of the Earth’s surface through GPS and satellite radar data to see what’s underground. Schultz’s focus on the Yellowstone caldera is part of a larger project, the magnetotelluric component (also known as EMScope) of the National Science Foundation’s EarthScope Program.

Topography of Yellowstone-Snake River Plan study area (see inset map for location within the United States), with physiographic provinces outlined in red. USArray magnetotelluric (MT) site locations used for this study are marked with blue dots; 32 sites from the earlier Snake River Plain profiles are denoted by green dots. Smaller gray dots indicate heat flow from an earlier study by Pollack et al. (1991), ranging from 0 (white) to >300 mW/m2 (black) (Figure courtesy of Amna Kelbert; Source: Kelbert A., Egbert G.D., deGroot-Hedlin C. 2012. “Crust and upper mantle electrical conductivity beneath the Yellowstone Hotspot Track” Geology, v. 40, p. 447-450, doi:10.1130/G32655.1)

Schultz, a former program director for the NSF, heads EMScope. In the quest to understand more about the history of the North American continent, EarthScope makes seismic, GPS and MT surveys of the United States and part of Canada. EMScope provides the geomagnetic facet of the survey, producing 3-D images of Earth’s electrical conductivity variations beneath the continent.

Sweeping west to east, scientists are deploying portable arrays of magnetometers and electric field sensors in plastic boxes buried a foot or two in the ground. These small devices silently collect data over a period of one to three weeks, depending on the level of solar storm activity, which provides the source of their signal. Remarkably, the stream of charged particles emitted from the Sun’s atmosphere, the “Solar Wind,” is what makes this all happen. Some of those particles are captured by the Earth’s magnetic field and form gigantic electric currents that flow above the atmosphere, the most famous of which are the aurora (the Northern and Southern Lights). These currents cause other electric currents to flow inside the Earth’s crust and mantle, generating a signal that is detectable by MT devices.

Ancient Rift Revealed

Schultz first encountered geophysics at Brown University in 1979 when MT systems and computers were the size of travel trailers. Instruments today are small, rugged and more mobile. Teams of scientists are currently creating 3D images of the electrical conductivity beneath the comparatively flat landscape of the Midwest. Early results already reveal a billion-year-old ancient rift down the center of the continent, a feature hidden by vast seas of crops and flattened by millions of years of erosion. Magnetotellurics provides a view that goes below the region’s apparent horizon-to-horizon uniformity.

In Oregon, Schultz also leads a magnetotelluric study contributing to the potential geothermal development of Newberry Volcano just south of Bend. Nearly 20 times larger than Mount St. Helens, Newberry is Oregon’s largest volcano. Its flanks slope so gently that it’s hardly visible from any roadside viewpoint. In fact, the city of Bend sits close to the northern flank. The volcano isn’t dead, however. Massive amounts of heat lie just beneath the surface, a potentially large source of alternative energy waiting to be utilized.

The U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Lab (NETL) has contracted with Oregon State to monitor and assist in the development of a geothermal system on the caldera’s western rim. AltaRock, a geothermal energy company, aims to demonstrate that sufficient heat can be harnessed from deep beneath the surface. It might be possible to generate electricity at commercially competitive levels. To do so, technicians begin by injecting cold fluids at high pressure into the cracks and crevices in the blistering but otherwise dry basalt underground. Ultimately, those heated fluids could then be extracted to create steam and drive electric turbines to generate power.

Unfortunately, water changes the rock to clay, creating a slimy obstacle that would block the cracks and shut off the water flow back to the surface. However, the fluids also change conductivity, and this property allows geophysicists like Schultz to make 3-D surveys that help identify clogs in the plumbing and keep the water flowing and creating steam.

There’s even a future for magnetotellurics in ocean-wave energy. Turbine buoys used in wave-energy projects generate electromagnetic fields. Since some marine species may be sensitive to electric and magnetic fields, the turbines could potentially disrupt marine ecosystems. To ensure the safety of these fragile areas, Schultz and his team are developing new sensors to gather electromagnetic, seismic and other data. The latest sensor, affectionately called Beaver 1 by the National Geoelectromagnetic Facility, Schultz’s lab, is destined for the ocean floor beneath wave turbines off the Oregon coast.

Continental Collision

Back at Yellowstone, data from MT surveys offer evidence of a more complex explanation for the heat beneath the world’s first national park. While the EMScope sensors have moved on to other areas, early results show the melted remains beneath and to the west of the giant volcano. They whisper of a subducted past. Over 200 million years ago, the Farallon plate, the ancient piece of crust between the North American and Pacific tectonic plates, began to dive beneath young North America. Geologists have known for some time that rather than angling steeply toward the mantle, the Farallon hugged the base of the continent all the way to the current Rocky Mountains. About 16 million years ago, interactions between the diving plate and a mantle plume began forming the volcanic features of the Snake River Plain and Yellowstone before eventually descending to be recycled. All that’s left of the Farallon, mere slivers of its past size, grinds today beneath the coast of North and Central America. Off the Pacific Northwest coast, those remains are called the Juan de Fuca plate.

Geoscientists are still debating what the MT data mean for the evolution of the continent and for specific areas such as Yellowstone. Kelbert, Egbert and Schultz plan to refine their understanding with more magnetotelluric studies of the crust in higher resolution. EMScope is only a first step in 3-D geomagnetic surveys, and the discovery beneath Yellowstone is only a chapter of a complex history. This young science will undoubtedly illuminate more untold stories that lie beneath our feet. Geophysicists will have their hands full for years to come.

_______________________

Amanda Enbysk is a senior in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences.

The article contains an account of work sponsored by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, both agencies of the United States Government. Neither the United States Government nor any agency thereof, nor any of their employees, makes any warranty, express or implied, or assumes any legal liability or responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information, apparatus, product, or process disclosed, or represents that its use would not infringe privately owned rights. Reference therein to any specific commercial product, process, or service by trade name, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise does not necessarily constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by the United States Government or any agency thereof. The views and opinions of authors expressed therein do not necessarily state or reflect those of the United States Government or any agency thereof.

The Pringle Falls Experimental Forest

The summer is warm and sunny in Corvallis, but my travels draw me east. Over and past the Cascades is an open land where the cold sparkling waters of a river flow north, and the sweet smell of Ponderosa pine blends with the fresh scent of lodgepole — the Deschutes National Forest. My one-person tent is packed in the back of a white state-owned pick-up truck with the essentials: a sleeping bag, a GPS unit, a camera, some protein bars, lots of buffalo jerky, a “Rite in the Rain” notebook and a pencil, a brown backpack, a bright orange hard hat and a soil corer.

In the late afternoon, I arrive at the Pringle Falls Experimental Forest and set up camp. The Forest Service cabins are nestled next to the gurgling and gushing Deschutes, whose French name means “River of the Falls.” The sounds of the rapids downstream bring a sense of calmness to my spirit. At the campsite, the ground is laden with pinecones, and the pine drops (Pterospera andromedea) expose themselves above the dead needles, branches and other forest litter. I unpack my gear and prepare for an early start out to the field sites the next day.

Mixed stands of Ponderosa and lodgepole pine dominate the Pringle Falls forest.

As you might guess, this isn’t the typical camping trip. I am embarking on an expedition. As a graduate student in the College of Forestry at Oregon State University, I am exploring something that lurks in the soils of Central Oregon — a fuzzy microscopic fungus that colonizes tree roots and might predict the future of the forest.

But why is the future of the forest at stake, and why dig underground when we are concerned about trees? The answer lies in the effects that organisms have on one another in a forest ecosystem. Like intricate underground machinery, fungi connect life-giving nutrients in the soil to roots that transport water and food to tree trunk, branch and leaf. Trees connect to climate and wildlife in an environment that evolves over time.

In the near future, scientists expect that climate will change and our forests will adapt. Tree zones will shift and a valuable tree species in the Deschutes National Forest — lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta) — is predicted to decline. This change will affect people as well. Native Americans used the long, straight and lightweight poles to build teepees. Today we commercially harvest lodgepole for telephone poles and fences. Big-game animals, such as deer and elk, use lodgepole as habitat.

Pine drops

Researchers at Oregon State University suggest that, as the climate warms, lodgepole pine will decline in the Pacific Northwest by the end of the 21^st century. As a result, Ponderosa pine (Pinus ponderosa) may be able to migrate into lodgepole zones. But this migration is dependent on the distribution or co-migration of mycorrhizae (fungi that live on tree roots), which are largely unexplored in Central and Eastern Oregon. The question is: Will this migration will be successful?

To answer that question, it helps to know a little about an ancient relationship. Scientists think that mycorrhizae, the fungus colonizing tree roots, evolved with land plants. Fungi and plants have been together since the Devonian period, which began more than 400 million years ago. External root fungi, otherwise known as ectomycorrhizae, form a sheath on the exterior of tree roots. These artful fungi form symbiotic, or beneficial, relationships with their host. Once colonization is complete, they send out filaments, which mine the soil for water and essential nutrients such as nitrogen.

Ultimately, it comes down to a trade that the tree host must submit to: The tree provides carbon, in the form of sugars, to the fungus in exchange for nutrients. The relationship is essential for the host and fungus to have the highest degree of success in the ecosystem — in this case, an ecosystem that I have the privilege to explore.

Getting to the core

The author takes a soil core.

The morning sun is bright in Central Oregon, but the air is cold and crisp. On my drive to the field sites, I can see the white peaks of Three Sisters in the distance. I pull the truck into the first site, take out my maps and venture out into the forest.  My leather boots softly crunch on the dried pine needles covering the soil. I pound my soil corer into the ground making sure to take a sample of the top 15 centimeters  (about six inches) of soil. I take in the smell of fresh earth, as I unscrew the metal corer to reveal a rich brown cylindrical soil core made up of pumice, fine roots and the mycorrhizae, too small to be seen with the naked eye. I dump the dirt, fine roots and all, into a Ziploc bag and place it in my backpack for analysis.

In the lab in Corvallis, I use molecular technology, such as DNA tests, to identify the root fungi of Ponderosa and lodgepole pine. I extract DNA, compare it to mushroom DNA in a database and identify the suspects. Like a detective, I name the species and unearth the world that had lain unexamined beneath the soil. And suddenly, this underground community is less of a mystery.

Russula

Cortinarius

My analysis reveals a diversity of species: Cenococcum, a black crusty fungus that doesn’t form mushrooms; Rhizopogon, which often forms subterranean truffles; and typical mushroom producers Cortinarius, Russula and Inocybe. It also reveals that the fungal community connected to Ponderosa pine and lodgepole overlap. That means that, when it comes to soil biology at least, Ponderosa will have a high chance of survival if it migrates into a lodgepole zone.

As the climate warms and the tree zones shift, the forest where we recreate and connect with nature may not be as we remember it. The warming climate might diminish one valuable member of the community, but forests know how to persist. By looking at underground fungi, we can determine whether trees have the potential to migrate into new zones and succeed. In the future, the smell of lodgepole pine might be absent from the breeze and the long skinny poles will be no more. Instead, the presence of underground fungi suggests that we might become immersed in the rich mahogany bark and sweet scent of Ponderosa.

___________________

Editor’s note: Maria Garcia is a master’s student working with Jane E. Smith, research botanist in the USDA Forest Service. Garcia’s research is supported by the Forest Service and by a Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation.

Stuart Sarbacker teaches on the theory, history and practice of yoga at Oregon State University. Listen to a podcast with Sarbacker.  (Photo: Theresa Hogue)

For many people, yoga is a form of relaxation. But in India, the birthplace of the exercise, yoga is beginning to stretch beyond the boundaries of one’s self and into the ecological realm. A new movement called “Green Yoga” encourages men and women who practice yoga — called yogis and yoginis — to strive for bettering their environment.

Green Yoga was pioneered by an influential Indian figure, Swami Ramdev. Stuart Sarbacker, assistant professor of philosophy at Oregon State University, has studied Ramdev, who hosts a daily show in India combining yoga and activism. He has attracted some 250 million viewers of all ages.

“Part of what drew me to study Swami Ramdev is this notion that inner transformation should be reflected outwards in some sort of transformation of the external world,” says Sarbacker. This idea is paramount in Green Yoga as well.

“What happens on the mat, so to speak, should translate into a transformed relationship with the world. That transformation may be reflected through personal choices, such as choosing organic foods, or it might mean buying a yoga mat made from natural rubber instead of plastic,” Sarbacker adds.

But Green Yoga doesn’t stop at consumer goods. Ramdev has used the practice to establish landmark status and protection for the heavily polluted Ganges River. Previously it was believed that the Ganges could not become dirty despite the dumping of untreated sewage and chemicals. But through non-violent protests and Green Yoga, Ramdev has created awareness for the river in both the people and the political leaders.

Sacred River

“One of the things that interests me very much is the idea that the Ganges historically was viewed as inherently pure. For most Hindus, it is in fact a Goddess, Gunga,” says Sarbacker. “Instead of thinking you can put whatever you want in the Ganges and she will always be pure, the discourse has shifted more towards what are we doing towards our sacred river, to our goddess by pouring our waste into it?”

Swami Ramdev (Photo: Wikipedia)

Sarbacker has written extensively on the theory, history and practice of yoga and is looking into the relationship between spirituality and environmental philosophy. He has focused specifically on Ramdev. “I’m using ethnographical and anthropological methods to create a snapshot of the development of a particular institution and really the life of a particular teacher, at a certain moment in time.”

Sarbacker wonders if Ramdev will next champion the topic of climate change in India. With the Ganges River being fed by receding glaciers, the water system is at risk, yet little attention has been brought to this issue. Whether Ramdev’s prominence will be sufficient to tackle it is yet to be determined, however with a stardom that has been compared to Oprah’s, he is in a position to do so.

Sarbacker is a certified yoga teacher in addition to being a professor. In spring 2013, he will teach a course at Oregon State about Green Yoga with an ecological consciousness.

___________________

Listen to a podcast with Stuart Sarbacker here.

Mary Crow leads a hike at Rimrock Ranch for the Deschutes Land Trust. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

When Mary Crow paddles her kayak on Sparks Lake near Sisters, she can hear the water draining into the lava tubes below. Listening to the water gurgle, thinking about the ancient eruptions that formed Central Oregon’s porous landscape, makes her shiver with wonder and delight.

Dave Bone can’t stop talking about the wild wolves he spotted in Yellowstone Park last summer. If he tells you the story more than once — about how the pack jostled and tumbled playfully on a meadow where bison grazed, unperturbed — he should be forgiven. His awe is boundless and unabashed.

Crow and Bone are lifelong naturalists. Only on the land do they feel whole. Harvard’s Howard Gardner, author of the theory of multiple intelligences, believes this bone-deep connection to the earth is innate. He calls it “naturalist intelligence” or “nature smart.” Just as some babies are born with special gifts for music or math, Gardner argues, others come into the world with an exceptional sensitivity to nature.

It is this gift, this abiding passion, that Oregon State University’s Oregon Master Naturalist program (OMN) was designed to embrace and extend. “We are building support for wise stewardship of the environment and deeper understanding of natural resource management,” says Jason O’Brien who coordinates the program for the Oregon State Extension Service. It is one of nearly 40 similar programs around the nation.

Crow and Bone are two of the first 46 participants to complete all 80-plus hours of training for OMN, which began as a pilot effort on the Oregon coast in 2010. An online curriculum gave them an overview of Oregon’s biology, geology and ecology as well as natural resources stewardship and management.  They then met face-to-face with university scientists and other experts for classroom instruction and fieldwork in one of three ecoregions: East Cascades, Oregon coast and Willamette Valley. (Additional ecoregions will be brought into the program pending demand.)

Instruction spanned every perspective: macro to micro, flora and fauna, volcanic and tectonic forces shaping the landscape. One Saturday, the coastal participants met on the headlands at Cape Perpetua. There, Bob Lillie, an emeritus professor in OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, told them about geological phenomena like tsunamis and plate tectonics. Another time, the class convened at the Tillamook State Forest, where Frank Burris, an Extension watershed educator, and Glenn Ahrens, an Extension forester, delved into watersheds and riparian zones. Jamie Doyle, an educator with Sea Grant Extension, taught a class on Pacific Ocean fisheries and marine protected areas.

What the graduates do with their expertise looks different from place to place, person to person. One person might collect data as a citizen scientist, counting dead seabirds for COASST (Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team), for instance, or monitoring water quality for the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. Another person might be a guide, leading interpretive hikes for the Deschutes Land Trust. A third might opt for hands-on stewardship, planting aspen seedlings or building beaver barriers for a local watershed council. People who are less physically active might greet visitors at an interpretive center or use their skills behind the scenes designing brochures, editing newsletters or updating websites.

Hooking into an existing organization — either a natural resources agency or an environmental nonprofit — is the common denominator for all Master Naturalists, who must volunteer at least 40 hours yearly to keep their certification.

“The program leverages the time and talents of highly capable volunteers,” notes O’Brien, whose degrees are in wildlife biology and natural resources interpretation, and who is himself a fervent naturalist. “It can be a huge help to private and public organizations, especially in times of tight budgets or when professional staff can’t accomplish all the services they’re mandated to provide. It’s an embodiment of the land grant mission — serving the needs of the public.”

At Lake of the Woods in Southern Oregon, Master Naturalist Dave Bone shares his love of wildlife with young campers. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

MEDFORD – One evening when he was 8, Dave Bone’s mom bundled him up against the cold, set him on a wooden sled and told him to hang on tight. Then, leaning into the night, she pulled the sled through the snowy streets of Greene, Iowa. At City Hall on 2nd Street, she brought the sled to a stop and took her son by the hand.

Unbeknownst to him, little Dave was about to become a member of Cub Scout Pack 26, which was meeting on the second floor of the old brick building. “This looks like fun,” he remembers thinking when he walked in and saw the cluster of boys in their blue-and-yellow uniforms.

Beverly Bone couldn’t have imagined that 55 years later and 2,000 miles away, her son still would be scouting. That fateful sled ride launched him on a lifetime of outdoor exploration, service and education. This Eagle Scout’s recent segue into Oregon Master Naturalists was just a logical extension of what he’s been doing for a half-century.

Animal Planet

One mist-gray morning in Southern Oregon, Bone is striding along the shore at Lake of the Woods when a flash of white catches his eye. “Bald eagle!” he calls out, pointing toward a reedy promontory. He quickly sets up his spotting scope as the bird unfolds its massive wings and lifts off, disappearing into the dense forest that hems the lake. “Hot dog!” he exclaims. Then, again, quietly to himself, “Hot dog.”

His excited reaction might suggest that this was his first eagle sighting. But Bone — a retired schoolteacher who taught science in the logging community of Butte Falls — has seen hundreds of eagles, “clouds” of snow geese and countless other raptors and waterfowl while tramping the mountains, valleys and wetlands near his Medford home.

While he loves birds, he’s an equal-opportunity wildlife enthusiast. Beavers, yellow-bellied marmots, flying squirrels — even the tiniest chipmunk and lowliest skunk — stir his sense of wonder even after many years as a Boy Scout camp administrator and, more recently, a volunteer at Camp McLoughlin on Lake of the Woods. Not content to stay inland, Bone also serves as a site captain and interpreter for Whale Watching Spoken Here (a program of the Oregon Department of Parks and Recreation) and as education chair for Shoreline Education for Awareness (a “friends group” of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service).

“Scenery is fantastic, but it’s the wildlife that makes it come alive,” he says. To emphasize his point, he reaches into the pocket of his rain pants and pulls out a clump of folded bills bound by a silver money clip, a gift from his wife, Bea. He reads aloud the inscription, a quote from the 1972 ecology movie Home. “If all the animals were gone, man would die of a great loneliness of spirit.”

The Wow Factor

Sharing nature has been his calling ever since earning his master’s in outdoor education at Southern Oregon University after he moved west with his bride, a native Oregonian. “The three key words in the mission of Oregon Master Naturalists are explore, connect, contribute,” he says. “Those are the same concepts I work with in the Boy Scouts. Taking people outdoors, guiding discovery, encouraging conservation — that’s what both programs are all about.”

For him, it all comes together in the astonished gasp of a wide-eyed child.  “I call it the ‘wow factor,’” he says. “It warms the cockles of my heart.”

_______________________________

See more stories from the Corps of Discovery.

Oregon State University master naturalist volunteers Anne Marie Farell-Matthews and Philip Matthews cut open sacks of native Olympia oysters and spread them on a muddy flat at Oregon's South Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve near Charleston. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

COOS BAY – Lots of people fantasize about appearing on American Idol or Wheel of Fortune. But Oregon Field Guide? Not so much — that is, unless you happen to be Anne Farrell-Matthews and Philip Matthews. Whether they’re heaving bags of oysters around a sandbar or hauling groundwater monitors across a salt marsh, this pair of Oregon Master Naturalists could easily imagine OPB TV host Steve Amen showing up with a video crew. For the Coos Bay couple, joining in on ecosystem science and restoration is that glamorous.

So how is it that this hip couple in their 40s gets all excited about red tree voles, beaver scat and shimmy worms? Why would a general contractor and a graphic designer get up at 5 a.m. to wade around in the muck trying to save native oysters? Why would a pair of avid surfers forego great waves to study physical oceanography and the Cascadia Subduction Zone late into the night?

Partly because the South Slough runs through their veins. Philip tramped these mudflats and salt marshes relentlessly as a kid, his Irish setter Britta beside him. Anne came to Coos Bay later, at 19, from landlocked Denver where her bedroom walls had been plastered with whale posters. Finally, she felt like she could breathe. Together, they’ve explored every twist and tangle of the slough, which became the nation’s first national estuarine research reserve in the 1970s.

The other answer is more cerebral. It has to do with making amends and taking ownership. It has to do with helping to heal the landscape they love, a landscape that has been stressed by overharvesting, pollution and population growth over the past century and a half.

Philip’s motives are particularly personal. “I’m half French, half redneck,” he likes to joke. Describing his mom’s family, the French side of the clan, as “extreme environmentalists,” he hammers home his point by saying, “My uncle once chained himself to City Hall to protect shorebirds from hunters.” It’s his dad’s side for which he’s now making atonement. “My dad came from people who took advantage of the environment — poaching, fishing for salmon with dynamite, some pretty serious abuses of nature,” he explains. “I want to help offset some of the negative stuff.”

Turning the Tide

One August morning just as the sun is displacing the moon, Philip and Anne are skimming across the slough in a skiff with a team of scientists, students and volunteers, all Velcroed into brown neoprene chest waders and slip-proof boots. They set anchor at a spit called Younker Point. Footprints of shorebirds trace trails in the wet sand as the team, working fast against the tide, digs up bundle after bundle of oysters for transfer to a new location as part of a NOAA-funded project led by the South Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve. Restoring native Olympia oysters (Ostrea lurida) to the slough is the project’s long-term goal, and preliminary findings show that the oysters, transplanted from Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery in Tillamook, could survive and grow. But over time, excessive siltation turned out to be a problem at Younker Point, explains Dave Landkamer, an aquaculturist with Oregon Sea Grant, who’s helping with the oyster transfer.

“They’ve been suffocated in silt,” Landkamer says. “You can see by the ripples in the wet sand that there’s too much wave and tidal energy here for good oyster habitat. “
That’s why, after wrestling the mesh bags from the sand’s sucking grip, the team slings them into the skiff and another small boat for relocation. The morning sun is just cresting the treetops as the team speeds toward Long Island Point, a place where ancient shell middens are evidence of long-ago oyster beds. Alongshore, white egrets and blue herons stalk their prey. Cormorants circle overhead. Gulls cry out. A bald eagle rises from the pinnacle of a fir.

Out at the point, the team hurriedly stacks the bags to create a reef of oyster shells in hopes that the “Olys” will settle and spawn. This is just an early stage of longer-term studies. The National Estuarine Research Reserve Science Collaborative, which brings local stakeholders into its research process, is funding the next phase of the investigation. Someday, native oysters may once again be abundant in the South Slough.

Natural Mastery

As the team disembarks back at Charleston Bay’s boat basin, Philip’s face is smudged with mud. Anne is wet to the skin from the saltwater that “topped over” her waders. So it’s more than a little incongruous that their expressions fall somewhere between serenity and ecstasy. Clearly, getting sweaty, soggy and dirty is exactly what they signed up for when they chose to become Oregon Master Naturalists.

“I’m cold and I’m muddy,” Anne says with a huge grin. “And I had a great time!”

Then she adds reflectively: “Estuaries are the nurseries of the planet. If I can contribute in some tiny way to keeping them healthy, that’s what I want to do. After all, this is our own backyard.”

____________________________

Read more about Oregon Master Naturalists in Corps of Discovery.

Hikers tour Rimrock Ranch, which has been placed in a conservation easement for the Deschutes Land Trust. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

SISTERS – A group of hikers stands on the rim of Whychus Canyon, a steep V gouging the rangeland. The canyon’s exposed layers reveal 5 million years of geologic history. Far below, Whychus Creek glints among aspen and cottonwood whose leaves have turned the color of butter. Black Butte and Mt. Jefferson command the western horizon.

On this bright October day at Rimrock Ranch — where Red Anguses ruminate contentedly, saddle horses graze peacefully, and the breeze is as benign as a baby’s breath — guide Mary Crow is telling a story about the natural history of this protected place when someone calls, “Look!” Every face turns just as a golden eagle comes into view, soaring on wings as wide as a human is tall. Riding a thermal along the rimrock, its shadow skimming the yellow rock face, the bird is so close the hikers can almost touch it.

Trek Through Time

The eagle’s passage sets the tone for the next four hours — a magical trek into a landscape forged over eons by eruptions and floods, altered by early settlers and 20th-century engineers, and now being restored to ecosystem health by the Deschutes Land Trust, which is sponsoring the hike.

Guiding tours for the Land Trust has been, for years, an outgrowth of Crow’s passion for the land. As a lifelong adventurer in the East Cascades ecoregion, she has been getting to know these mountains, rivers and rangelands as she hikes, skis and kayaks. So when she heard about Oregon State’s new Master Naturalist program, this self-described “wannabe scientist” jumped at the opportunity.

“I always felt I had gaps in my knowledge,” says Crow, a retired librarian and former technician at Intel in Hillsboro. “Now, with the Master Naturalist program, I feel like I’m able to give more to the participants in my tours.”

As she leads the hikers — mostly retired professionals including a school superintendent, a geophysicist and a university professor — she points out the wind-sculpted rock towers called hoodoos that jut upward from the canyon walls. She talks about the Deschutes Formation, layers of sedimentary and volcanic deposits laid down between the Miocene and Pliocene, upon which Rimrock Ranch’s 1,100 acres sit. The Land Trust, she says, is removing juniper (which sucks up tons of water) and restoring Ponderosa pine (which smells like a caramel latte if you get close enough to sniff the bark). Native grasses are coming back as local “weed warriors” eradicate invasive plants.

At the bottom of the canyon, the hikers contemplate the creek that once ran thick with steelhead. Someday, Crow tells them, Chinook salmon and steelhead will once again swim and spawn in the Whychus, a Deschutes River tributary originating in the Three Sisters Wilderness and channelized in the 1960s to control flooding. It will reclaim its meandering path through the meadow as part of the Land Trust’s agreement with landowners Bob and Gayle Baker, who have put the ranch into a conservation easement for perpetual protection.

The sun slips past its zenith, and the group loops back toward the trailhead. Crow takes a whiskbroom from the backseat of her all-wheel-drive Toyota and shows the hikers how to brush their boots before heading home. It’s not dust she’s worried about. It’s invasive seed heads. “We don’t want these ending up over at the Metolius River,” she explains.

___________________________

Read more stories about Oregon Master Naturalists in the Corps of Discovery.

Lynn Carlon, research technician at the Eastern Oregon Agricultural Research Center in Burns, soothes every cow with a head scratch following a vaccination. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

Making ethical choices about animals can be a philosophical high-wire act — a precarious balance of practicality and principle. Weighing practical needs against “normative ethics” — right or wrong, good or bad, just or unjust — requires more than a handbook of do’s and don’ts.

“The institutional protocols — the laws, regulations, policies — provide a framework, but a lot of situations are subject to interpretation,” says OSU Professor Jill Parker, a large-animal surgeon who teaches Veterinary Medical Ethics to second-year veterinary students. “Decisions need to be based on a reasoned decision process.”

For students eyeing careers at clinics, biomedical labs or other veterinary enterprises, ethical skills count as much as finesse with a syringe, a scalpel or a stethoscope. Through role-play and case studies, Parker pushes her students to challenge their assumptions. In one scenario, for example, fictional researchers at a make-believe university are using pigs to develop heart valves for humans. Parker’s students pretend to be various characters, such as university researcher Dr. D. Zyne and heart patient B.D. Hart. The scenario is further complicated by hypothetical animal-rights protesters.

Across campus in Animal and Rangeland Sciences, Matt Kennedy wades into equally uncomfortable territory when he teaches Contentious Social Issues in Animal Agriculture. The course, which draws 200 students yearly from majors as diverse as engineering and art, tackles such hot-button issues as agri-terrorism, horse slaughter, wolves versus livestock, gestation crates for pigs, genetic engineering and the history of the animal rights movement.

“We educate them to look at the facts before the emotions,” says Kennedy, who manages the Campus Swine Unit and Steer-A-Year program. “Our goal is not to sway them to one side or another, but to let them make their own decisions through critical thinking.”

Sillett holds the Kenneth L. Fisher Chair in Redwood Forest Ecology at Humboldt State University in Arcata, Calif. His research has been featured in National Geographic six times since 1997. He last appeared in the December 2012 issue, in which he discusses climbing the world’s second-largest tree in the Sierra Nevada. Recently, Sillett answered some of our questions about his research and what it’s like to climb into trees more than 3,000 years old.

Read the interview on Powered by Orange.

Connections to Asia are expanding. They encompass a wide range of activities including academic conferences, student exchanges and faculty collaborations. They focus on business, engineering, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, wood science, music and more.

The university’s growing international influence is fueled by student recruitment through INTO OSU as well as by direct enrollment in many of our leading research-based graduate programs, says Provost Sabah Randhawa.

“OSU enjoys a strong reputation in Asia and is cited as one of the top 150 universities in the world in international ranking programs,” Randhawa adds. “Many top universities in the region are eager to partner with us for student and faculty exchange programs and global research initiatives.”

Business
The Global Business Analysis Group is working with Dalian University of Technology and the City University of Hong Kong in China and with Yonsei University in South Korea. Researchers are focusing on supply chains, sustainability, business law and operations management.

Apparel and Aging
With colleagues in China, Taiwan and South Korea, Oregon State researchers are exploring cross-national consumer behavior in the domestic and international textile and apparel industries.

Earthquakes and Tsunamis
In Indonesia, Oregon State researchers are working with scientists on the historical record of earthquakes and tsunamis. The subduction zone just west of Sumatra is similar to the Cascadia subduction zone off the Oregon coast.

Music
For the past 12 years, Oregon State’s Department of Music has conducted an exchange program with the cultural ministry of Henan Province in China.

Pharmaceuticals
Oregon State scientists are participating in the search for new antibiotics with colleagues in China, Indonesia, South Korea and Thailand. In Indonesia, they are identifying novel compounds with antimicrobial benefits.

Environment and Agriculture
Air quality, dam construction and agricultural crops are under study byOregon State and Chinese colleagues. They have documented the impacts of polluted air and dam construction. Agricultural scientists have focused on grass seed, forage crops and livestock.

If transportation planners and environmental protection agencies could join hands early in the process, costly delays could be avoided and sensitive ecosystems could be better protected. Enter a powerful new tool designed by researchers at the Institute for Natural Resources based at Oregon State. Using the Integrated Ecological Framework, planners can address the requirements of the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Water Act from Day One instead of bumping up against them when the project is already moving ahead.

“Particularly for wetlands and endangered species, regulatory conflicts and delays largely result from transportation planners and regulators having insufficient, incomplete or poor-quality data,” say OSU researchers Lisa Gaines, interim director for the institute, and Jimmy Kagan. “This new tool will help speed up transportation projects while beefing up environmental stewardship.”

Further testing and refinement of the tool is under way with continued support from the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies, which is looking ahead to rolling the framework out nationally.

Julia Rosen explains how to extract ancient air from ice samples in OSU’s Ice Core Laboratory (Photo: Jeff Basinger)

A shard of ice sits on the black surface of the lab desk, buoyed in a growing puddle. Three small heads hover above in a tight huddle. “It’s cold,” notes one of the kids. Somehow, this obvious observation always catches me off guard, as if I’ve forgotten the most fundamental quality of water’s solid phase. “That’s true,” I reply, “it’s also 10,000 years old.”

“Wow!” the students chorus, and their eyes widen as they look again with renewed awe at this innocuous specimen that could have come from an ice-cube tray in their freezer. Whether I am visiting loquacious third-graders or shyly curious middle-schoolers, I am always touched by the unjaded willingness of youth to imagine and attempt to grasp the unseen. It’s the reason every scientist falls in love with science.

I analyze ice cores in the Oregon State University Ice Core Laboratory and no longer think about their cool touch. I have learned that, like people, the most interesting things about them lie hidden inside. And, like people, it takes time and patience to understand them. When we succeed, these frozen time capsules from Greenland and Antarctica allow us to reconstruct climate far into the past so that by understanding its natural rhythms and quirks, we can predict what kind of future awaits these students.

But let’s start with the obvious: a clear, smooth cylinder of ice glittering with tiny bubbles like a flute of frozen champagne. Stunningly boring to behold, only an occasional band of volcanic ash or the subtle cloudy layers formed during dusty polar winters break its translucent monotony. However, this continuity is actually an ice core’s greatest strength. It provides a complete, unbroken record of past climates, one that is unavailable in almost any other natural archive.

As detectives of Earth’s history, geologists reconstruct stories from snapshots of ancient seas and whispers of long-dead creatures, piecing together a hazy story of our planet’s past. Ice cores are the long-lost diaries of climate. Every day, they recorded the temperature, sniffed the air and noted the snowfall. They sensed changes far from their polar homes — the amount of dust lofted from Asia, the gurgle of tropical volcanoes and much more. From the top to the bottom of a core lie flakes that witnessed every moment of geologic time that elapsed in between.

Thin Air

Physicists, chemists and geologists have spent 60 years learning to translate the primordial language of ice. Early pioneers of ice-core science discovered that they could estimate temperature using the chemistry of rain and snow. As the air warms, precipitation gathers more heavy molecules and fewer light molecules (known as isotopes) of water. The ratio of these isotopes thus provides a record of temperature. These scientists had the transformative idea of using old ice to reconstruct climate by exploiting this valuable relationship.

Each new analytical tool that becomes available to scientists provides another Rosetta Stone for decoding long-lost archives of the ice. Today, we can measure trace amounts of chemical impurities deposited on the ice sheets as dust and aerosols. They tell us how sea ice waxed and waned and which way the wind blew. They reveal the fingerprints of individual volcanic eruptions. While only the pristine inner core provides suitably clean ice for these highly sensitive measurements, the “snow dust” from cutting and cleaning the core does not go to waste. It can be used, for example, to reconstruct concentrations of a rare element, beryllium-10. Produced by cosmic rays high in the atmosphere, the abundance of this element reflects shifts in solar radiation.

Lit by an Arctic midnight sun, this iceberg was spawned by one of Greenland’s fastest moving glaciers near Illulissat. About 400 feet high, it covered an area larger than a city block. (Photo: Julia Rosen)

Of all the stories that ice cores tell, however, the bubbles of air embedded within them actually contain the most impressive secrets. As snow accumulated over thousands of years, slowly hardening into solid ice and forming the massive polar ice sheets, it sealed off little breaths of ancient air between the grains of snow — the very same air we would have inhaled if we had stood on top of the ice sheet 8,000 years ago, or 80,000 or 800,000. From those microscopic samples, we can retrace the evolution of our planet’s atmosphere across almost a million years of Earth history, a period that encompasses nearly all of human existence.

Revelations

In Antarctica, where extreme cold and meager snowfall limit the flow of ice, these cores stretch back across eight glacial cycles. During each, the Earth oscillated between periods of cold climate and expansive ice, including a vast glacial blanket that smothered northern North America, and a time of balmy warmth with ice sheets comparable in size to those on Earth today. Wobbles in the planet’s orbit periodically brought it closer to and farther from the sun’s furnace, setting the rhythm of the climatic metronome.

Across these dramatic changes, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases rose and fell with the global temperature as the Earth’s oceans and biosphere adjusted to a changing environment. These gases both responded to climate change and amplified it through their potent ability to trap the Earth’s outgoing energy. But never in the past 800,000 years did these gases reach concentrations even remotely approaching current levels, and never did they rise so quickly, or shoot up at the end of an interglacial period when the receding sun should have lulled the Earth back into an icy slumber.

At the other pole, ice cores in Greenland felt those same changes, although the records of climate before 120,000 years ago crept away through the unstoppable march of glaciers to the sea. Nonetheless, these cores tell us something else completely new. Throughout the last cold period on Earth, which our ancestors waited out in the mild climates of Africa, the Northern Hemisphere experienced a barrage of climate changes so swift and so huge that certain places on Earth warmed by 20 degrees Fahrenheit in a matter of decades. The cause of these dramatic jolts remains a mystery, but their power to radically reorganize the Earth system attests to the inherent volatility of the world in which modern civilization has only recently made a home.

We are slowly beginning to understand the anatomy of global climate and how it changes, its geographic fingerprint and its tempo. Ice cores paint a complex and sometimes surprising picture, one that generations of scientists will spend decades trying to fully understand. We now know the correct greenhouse gas concentrations to feed into our calculations as we simulate past climates in order to validate models for the future.

Ice cores have made one thing abundantly clear: Humans are in uncharted territory. In 800 millennia of records, no entries document a climate like the one we live in today. Even as you read this, we are busy writing the next page of the ice-core diaries.

Illustration by Hank Osuna

Time to Listen

These observations from opposite poles forewarn a perilous future for our planet. We know without question that we’ve entered a period in geologic history for which there is no natural analog, and we know that the Earth’s climate can respond dramatically to perhaps even the smallest nudge.

However, the most terrifying lesson I learned from ice cores did not come from drilling into the past, but from just standing on the surface. At 80 degrees North, well above the Arctic Circle in the empty white wilds of the Greenland ice sheet, I watched a supply plane on skis repeatedly try to lift off. First the crew dumped cargo and then off-loaded all their fuel except what they needed to get home. Finally, on their seventh attempt, they succeeded.

The problem? The snow had warmed to the freezing point, and microscopic drops of water on the surface made the friction between the skis and the ice too great to break. Last summer, 97 percent of the surface of Greenland experienced temperatures above freezing, more than any year in NASA’s 30 years of satellite observations.

The ice cores have told us all they know, and now it’s up to us to listen.

Editor’s note: Julia Rosen is working toward her Ph.D. in the Oregon State University Ice Core Laboratory under the guidance of Ed Brook, professor in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Support for the lab has come from the National Science Foundation’s Office of Polar Programs.

_______________________________________

For more information:

Analysis of Greenland Ice Cores Adds to Historical Record and May Provide Glimpse into Climate’s Future (Jan. 24, 2013)

Antarctic Ice Core Contains Unrivaled Detail of Past Climate, (Feb. 5, 2013)

Braelei Hardt (far right) explores Oregon's high desert with Honors College classmates Arthur To, Anantnoor Kaur, Lindsey Almarode. (Photo: Lindsey Almarode)

Parts of the Oregon outback are a poetic juxtaposition of passionate color scattered among charred, stalagmitic trees piercing the sky above like mighty javelins. In autumn, the understory blazes in hues of red, orange and yellow — colors that light the burnt forest as if it were once again on fire.

This scene in Central Oregon near the town of Sisters, where the Black Butte II fire of 2009 torched 630 acres of timber, may seem upsetting. But is fire only a force of terror?

John Buckhouse of the Institute of Water and Watersheds at Oregon State University says, avidly, “No!”

As a hydrologist, Buckhouse may seem like the wrong kind of expert to comment on the affairs of fire. He has, however, been studying the interconnecting effects of fire, water, and vegetation on Oregon’s rangeland ecology for years.

Buckhouse says fire is a critical element in retaining a healthy outback — and for a good reason, too. Fire has been part of Oregon’s natural cycle for thousands of years, and the land in turn has evolved to accommodate and even depend on fire. It used to ravage the area every seven to 15 years, keeping large trees like Ponderosa pines in check and burning off dead matter that would otherwise steal life-giving sun from the active plants underneath it. Lodgepole pines actually depend on fire to reproduce, for their cones only release seeds in the heat of flame.

Since the development of effective firefighting techniques, concerned citizens looking to “save” the environment have disrupted this cycle and thrown the natural order of things out of balance, according to Buckhouse. The wildly adverse effects of this intervention are just recently coming to light, he says. The worst of these involve the western juniper tree.

Buckhouse’s longtime friend and colleague Hugh Barrett has been assessing juniper in Oregon’s high desert for eight years. He explains that before firefighting, fires would keep the juniper in balance with other desert-dwelling plants. Now, without the natural fire cycle, the trees have overtaken the land.

Most desert plants conserve energy by going into dormancy during the winter. All processes, including water use, come to a halt. This allows water from winter downpours and snowstorms to seep into the ground, where it is stored until spring when the land once again returns to life.

Juniper, however, does not go dormant. This creates a huge problem when there are too many juniper trees in one area. “Usually, you would see maybe four or five old junipers in an open expanse,” Barrett explains. “Now there are maybe 20. These large trees pump 25 to 30 pounds of water out of the soil per day.” This quickly depletes the desert’s winter water reserves, leaving smaller bunchgrasses to literally die of thirst. This is extremely evident when standing next to an old juniper, for there are no shrubs at all in a 30-foot radius around the tree.

The water-sucking junipers also cause even more advanced ecological problems. The increase in tall trees provides more perches for birds of prey. With more birds of prey, there are fewer ground mammals to disperse seeds, further diminishing the brush population.

Barrett notes that in areas without junipers, bitterbrush (named for its bitter taste) grows waist high in approximately nine months. In the land’s current state, it takes five years.

Braelei Hardt atop a rock formation in the high desert. (Photo:Caity Clark)

Why are these shrubs and grasses so important? The answer comes down to water retention. For a system’s watershed to be healthy, Barrett says, it must preserve three aspects: capture, hold, and safe release. The brush in Oregon’s outback contributes to the first aspect. “It’s like arm hair,” Buckhouse explains quirkily. “The arm is the land, and the hair is the brush. If you run water over a shaved arm, like a swimmer’s arm, the water rolls off quickly. But if you have hair, the water will trickle down, curving around the obstacles, and will have more time to soak in.” More time to soak in means greater water retention and a larger storage. Without sagebrush, bitterbrush, and bunchgrasses, the water simply rolls off the land and cannot be captured.

Buckhouse and Barrett are working on a plan to reintroduce flame into the desert in the form of controlled burns, which will burn off the parasitic junipers and restore these critical shrubs. This is how fire will save water — and how the high desert may return to its former glory.

Controlled burns would not only revive the environment but also yield economic gain, Buckhouse and Barrett stress. The Ponderosa pines and juniper trees have grown so large that many of them would need to be topped for the burn to work effectively. The remains could be chipped or sold to paper companies.

Barrett, like a docile bear, lumbers toward a massive juniper and rests his hand upon it. “We shouldn’t see the world as it is,” he says, “but as it can be.”