Scientists know that this scenario has happened repeatedly in the last 10,000 years and will do so again. Oregon State University geologist Chris Goldfinger calculates the chance of a major quake at 40 percent in the next 50 years off the southern Oregon coast. The frequency decreases as you move north, but the nearly 800-mile Cascadia subduction zone, where these quakes originate, could rupture anywhere. The last one wiped out villages. The next one will threaten cities and bring a regional economy to its knees.

Nevertheless, for most of us, the threat seems as likely as getting hit by lightning. We know it could happen, but we don’t take it seriously. It feels remote. “The paradigm shift among the citizens of the Northwest has not yet taken place,” says Bob Yeats, emeritus professor of geology at Oregon State and author of Living with Earthquakes in the Pacific Northwest.

As recently as 30 years ago, most scientists didn’t think a major quake could happen here. But, says Yeats in an upcoming book, evidence from coastal marshes, seafloor canyons, GPS monitoring stations and native traditions tell a compelling story: The western edge of North America is locked against another part of the Earth’s crust, the Juan de Fuca Plate, which is diving beneath us. Like wrestlers in mortal combat, they occasionally break their hold on each other and lurch into a new position. Geologists have given such events a name right out of Saturday night wrestling — “megathrust.” When it happens, the landscape vibrates like a bass drum. Seismic waves pulse through the crust for three minutes or more. Some types of soil liquefy and spread out. Bridge and building foundations get pushed out of alignment. Other soils could amplify the shaking from below, subjecting buildings, especially high-rises, to even more violent motion.

Lifelines

Scott Ashford has seen the consequences of these quakes in Chile, Japan and New Zealand: buildings and bridges tilted and broken like toys, beachfront tourist towns reduced to rubble, pipelines squeezed out of the ground like toothpaste out of a tube, businesses closed or forced to relocate.

“Many of Oregon’s lifeline providers have shared research needs, whether it’s to improve our ground motion predictions, to assess liquefaction potential of Oregon soils or to develop retrofit technologies for our legacy systems.”

— Matthew L. Garrett, Director, Oregon Department of Transportation

The Oregon State Kearney Professor of Engineering is determined to soften the blow when Oregon’s turn arrives. In 2010, after viewing damage from a megathrust quake in Chile, Ashford developed the idea for the Cascadia Lifelines Program, a consortium of Oregon businesses, government agencies and universities. The goal is to save lives and to shorten the time it will take for the state and the nation to recover.

“If you look at the effect on the people and at recovery, a key part of our resilience is lifelines,” Ashford says. “Electric power, natural gas, transportation systems, telecommunications, drinking water, sewer. And critical facilities like the Port of Portland and the Portland International Airport. All of these lifeline providers have common challenges to prepare for this next earthquake. None by itself has the financial ability to fund the research necessary. My vision is to pursue research of common interest to develop cost-effective solutions to mitigate the Cascadia earthquake.”

Members of the consortium already include the Oregon Department of Transportation, Portland General Electric, NW Natural (Northwest Natural Gas), the Port of Portland, the Portland Water Bureau and the Bonneville Power Administration. Ashford is lining up others as well. Among their concerns are building standards, landslides, communications and recovery strategies. But first up on their research agenda is an Oregon State study of soil liquefaction, the phenomenon that compounds the damage caused by seismic shaking.

Soil Sleuths

Soils are often named for the places where they’re found. California’s state soil is called San Joaquin. In Washington, Tokul soil is named after a community in King County. Oregon’s state soil is Jory, named for a hill in Marion County where a family of that name settled in 1852. For geotechnical engineers, another local soil poses a potential risk in a megathrust earthquake: Willamette silt.

With a texture midway between sand and clay, this remnant of the ancient Missoula Floods underlies much of the Willamette Valley. From McMinnville nearly to Eugene, bridge piers, roads (I-5, U.S. Highway 99) and pipelines run through or on top of Willamette silt. It carries railroad tracks and electric transmission lines. Large parts of Salem sit on it, as do Albany, Corvallis and Sweet Home. It is up to 130 feet deep in some places.

“We don’t really know anything about how Willamette silt responds to earthquakes,” says Ben Mason, an assistant professor of civil engineering at Oregon State. What he does know is that, as soils go, it doesn’t take much water for it to change from being dry and crumbly to taking on the properties of a liquid. “It has a low plasticity index. What that means is that it can liquefy during an earthquake,” he says. At least theoretically.

To find out for sure, Mason has collected Willamette silt from the Oregon State campus. Last winter, he and a colleague, Li Zheng from the Nanjing Hydraulic Research Institute in China (Li wants to know how earthen dams will perform during an earthquake), placed soil samples the size of hockey pucks in a device that simulates conditions deep underground. They subjected the samples to repeated, precisely controlled cycles of shaking. As a piston shook the sample, simulating seismic waves, sensors measured changes in volume and in water pressure inside the soil.

As the shaking continued, “the water pressure builds up, builds up and builds up and eventually the soil will act like a liquid,” says Mason. “And that’s when we say liquefaction happens.” In effect, he explains, soil structure breaks down, water oozes from pores where it had been bound and the soil turns into a mass with the consistency of pea soup.

We can see liquefaction in action when we walk on a beach, Mason adds. “If you run, you cause these minor liquefaction events. It’s a very dynamic load hitting the sand.” Water is forced out from between the grains and pools briefly on the surface. In contrast, water underground has nowhere to go. As Mason’s experiments show, pressure rises. The question is: Will it get high enough to trigger liquefaction? If it does and the soil happens to be on a slope, it can spread out, jeopardizing any structure that is in the way, such as a bridge pier, building foundation or pipeline.

Mason’s experiments are the first to be supported by Cascadia Lifelines Program funding. His lab is one of the few on the West Coast with the ability to subject soils to a wide range of precisely controlled earthquakes. His “cyclic simple shear” device can be programmed to mimic seismic waves with varying duration and strength. With accurate information about Willamette silt, engineers will be able to design structures that can minimize the damage from the possibility of soil movement caused by liquefaction. Engineering firms are already contacting him to test soil samples for project design purposes.

Buildings and Bridges

Most schools, city halls, bridges, commercial buildings and other structures in Oregon were built before the possibility of big earthquakes was taken seriously. “We don’t know how these buildings will perform (in an earthquake),” says Andre Barbosa, an Oregon State structural engineer. “We have a very rough idea. We know by year and type of construction, whether this or that building may behave well or not so well. But we don’t really know.”

Because seismic stresses were not even recognized in the state’s building codes until 1974, our infrastructure and architectural heritage are highly vulnerable. According to the Oregon Resilience Plan, a report produced by the Oregon Seismic Safety Policy Advisory Commission (OSSPAC) in 2013, nearly half of 2,193 schools assessed in the state have a high to very high potential for collapse. More than a third of the 2,567 bridges in the state highway system were built with no seismic considerations. All nine of Portland’s bridges over the Willamette were built before seismic codes were in force, although some have been strengthened.

But estimating vulnerability is only the start, says Barbosa, who specializes in structural performance in earthquakes. Engineers also need to evaluate strategies for retrofitting old structures and improving standards for new construction. Toward that end, Barbosa conducts experiments on building and bridge components in the Oregon State structures lab, which boasts the second-largest “strong floor” on the West Coast. It allows researchers to simulate earthquake forces up to 1 million pounds on frames up to two stories high. In a project for the Oregon Department of Transportation, Barbosa is evaluating the performance of high-strength reinforcing steel (aka “rebar”) to resist long-duration shaking.

That fills an important need in the Northwest where subduction zone earthquakes are likely to last three to five minutes or more. In contrast, crustal earthquakes, such as those along the famed San Andreas Fault in California, typically last 30 seconds or less. The difference adds up to higher demands on buildings, especially where the frequency of the seismic waves matches a structure’s internal characteristics.

“The main objective of our modern building codes is life safety,” Barbosa adds. “We design structures so that people can evacuate in case of strong shaking. The structure can vibrate back and forth, but it is designed not to collapse. That’s the life safety design approach.”

In addition to living in earthquake country, Barbosa has a personal connection to such events. He grew up in Lisbon, Portugal, which suffered a cataclysmic earthquake and tsunami in 1755. Geologists now estimate that it approached the strength of the 1700 megathrust earthquake in the Pacific Northwest. Since then, Portugal and the Northwest have experienced thousands of smaller quakes centered in local faults, but there have been no large events of the kind seen recently in Chile and Japan. “The problems we have in Portugal are the same as we have here in Oregon,” he says. “The return period for large earthquakes is very long. People just don’t remember.”

Nevertheless, Oregon is taking a leadership role in planning. Elsewhere, agencies and regions (the San Francisco Bay Area) have developed a holistic approach to resilience, but Oregon is the first to do so at the state level. “Through OSSPAC,” says Barbosa, “Oregon is doing something that is amazing.”

Sliding Slopes

When Michael Olsen pulls up a map of the Oregon Coast Range on his computer, he sees wide swaths of red dots. Each one represents landslide-prone areas identified through the highly accurate lens of a remote sensing technology known as LIDAR (“light detection and ranging”). The Oregon State civil engineer and Hoffman Faculty Scholar specializes in the emerging field of geomatics, which is land surveying on steroids. Geomatics practitioners analyze landscapes by combining remote sensing data (from the ground, the air or planetary orbit) and large spatial datasets for soils, vegetation, precipitation, streams and other features.

In the Coast Range, Olsen and his graduate students are assembling LIDAR data and layering it with what engineers know about the terrain. Working with the Oregon Department of Transportation, their goal is to estimate the likelihood of earthquake-triggered landslides near highways that link the I-5 corridor with coastal communities.

These mountains might be beautiful, but Olsen’s picture isn’t pretty. “The Coast Range consists of very loose soils that are of very poor quality. They don’t have a lot of strength to them,” he says. In an emergency, “barriers along these lifeline corridors would be a big problem. Even a small landslide can close down a road for a day or two.”
And it doesn’t take much to start Coast Range soils moving. Based on the locations of previous slides and knowledge of soil types, it appears that slopes as low as 10 to 15 percent are vulnerable to sliding. “That isn’t that much. It’s pretty scary that it’s that low,” Olsen says.

Landslides are hardly a new phenomenon in Oregon, but they are more common in some years than in others. The winter storms of 1996-97 generated an estimated 9,500 landslides, mostly in western Oregon. Scientists at the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries (DOGAMI) have calculated that, while economic losses exceed $10 million in a typical year, they exceeded $100 million that winter.

Although all Coast Range roads pass through slide-prone terrain, some may be less vulnerable and easier to re-open than others. Such information, says Olsen, will help ODOT prioritize roads for earthquake recovery purposes.

A Statewide Effort

By coordinating these and other research investments, Cascadia Lifelines meets an important need for state agencies and utility companies and fills a critical niche in statewide preparedness efforts. Spurred by the state Legislature, scientists, utility companies and agencies are evaluating risks and identifying solutions to mitigate the most significant impacts of the next megathrust earthquake. Schools and other public buildings have been assessed, and retrofits have begun. Roadways are being ranked for vulnerability to landslides and bridge failures. On the coast, evacuation routes are being marked to help coastal residents and visitors escape the tsunami zone.

“Given the nature and wide-ranging impact of seismic activity, it is appropriate that a consortium of organizations engaged in building, operating and maintaining critical infrastructure in Oregon could work together to identify and address concerns about improving seismic resilience.”

— Grant Yoshihara, Vice President, NW Natural

In 2011, Oregon’s Earthquake Commission (aka the Oregon Seismic Safety Policy Advisory Commission or OSSPAC) assembled experts to lay out the risks and recommend a series of steps for the next 50 years. It released a final report — The Oregon Resilience Plan — last February. “The broad picture of what needs to be done is pretty straightforward,” says Ian Madin, chief scientist for DOGAMI and an Oregon State alum who helped to lead the planning. “We need to strengthen our infrastructure so that it physically resists the effects of the earthquake, so that it is either undamaged or easily repairable.”

Engineers know how to design earthquake-resilient structures, say Madin and Ashford. They can “harden” foundation soils to resist liquefaction and construct bridges and buildings that can survive shaking. Such measures carry a stiff price tag, but the return on investment can be positive. For example, says Ashford, after the earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand, earthquake preparedness steps saved $10 for $1 spent.

Power to Recover

Ultimately, recovery is about more than engineering. It is about assistance for a traumatized citizenry, strategies for keeping small businesses afloat, security to prevent looting, radio systems that will work after cell-phone towers and land lines go down and policies that allow restoration projects to be fast-tracked. In Chile, Ashford adds, electricity was crucial for recovery efforts. Water pumps in rural areas, for example, couldn’t even be tested until power was restored. In New Zealand, homeowners insure against earthquakes as well as fire.

The government helped businesses get back on their feet by creating a temporary mall out of shipping containers. Grants kept paychecks flowing to employees who otherwise would have qualified for unemployment. Some businesses provided food and fuel to employees’ families so that workers could focus on the job of rebuilding without worrying if their loved-ones were safe.

Individuals need to prepare as well. “I’m a big believer in personal responsibility,” says Ashford. He has installed an electrical generator port on his home, keeps extra medication on hand and fills his truck’s fuel tank when it hits half empty. “Every family needs to be prepared to be on their own for a few days. Every community needs to be prepared to be on its own. If you are expecting the government to come in immediately with assistance, it may take many days or weeks for that help to arrive.”

Concord Elementary School fourth-graders learn about seeds and fall planting from Oregon Master Naturalist Maggie Thornton (Photo: Lynn Ketchum)

MILWAUKIE – Kids may not love finding a squash on their dinner plate. But when that squash is growing on a leafy vine in their school garden, it can be an object of delight. “Hey, this looks like a UFO!” declares one fourth-grader at Concord Elementary School, holding up a white, disk-shaped squash called a patty pan. Exclaims another, “The tiny tomatoes hanging on this branch look like raindrops — like it’s raining tomatoes!”

Poetry in Motion

It’s as if a bunch of pint-sized poets have been unleashed on this autumn day in Milwaukie, a Portland suburb. The metaphors and similes are as plentiful as the tomatoes here in the Willamette Valley ecoregion. “This looks like a witch’s nose!” one boy says, holding up a red orb with a hooked protrusion. “Look!” a girl calls out, dangling five or six bean pods in front of her chin. “I have a beard of beans!”

Set loose in the school garden at harvest time, the students’ imaginations are on overdrive. But amid the chaos, the kids are learning about the art of gardening. Teaching them to pull weeds, prep soil and sow seeds for cool-weather vegetables is Maggie Thornton, an OSU alum and Oregon Master Naturalist participant. “I like the way the program ties everything together — vegetation, geology, climate,” she says. “It recaptures the idea of the citizen scientist.”

With a bucketful of tools and a pocketful of seed packets, Thornton attracts clusters of kids like crape myrtle attracts honeybees. Growing things is, for her, “just a very natural part of life.” She’s been gardening since she was old enough to toddle around the family plot in Bend where she grew up. So a few years ago when her daughter’s first-grade class was growing sunflower seeds in jars for a science project, she was taken aback by the kids’ astonishment at seeing seeds germinate and sprout for the first time. “It was shocking and sad to see how many of them had no idea how nature works,” she recalls. “I decided I wanted to help get kids outside and connected to the natural world.” As the marketing manager for a horticulture company, she started a program to help schools put in gardens.

Wrangling Weeds

She stands back from the hubbub to watch the fourth-graders dig seed troughs for packets of radishes and turnips, wrangle with stubborn weeds, and shriek over the occasional slug or daddy longlegs. “It’s amazing and gratifying to see their reactions,” Thornton says. “They’re so joyful. They’re so delighted to be outdoors.”

Some of the kids have even made the connection between growing veggies and eating them. “You can slice up that patty pan and fry it in butter,” one girl observes. “It’s really good!”

______________________________________

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.

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.

Desert terrain north of Bishop, California (Photo: Bureau of Land Management)

I remember my first day at what’s called “baby field camp” in the Oregon State geology program. Outside Bishop, California, we mapped the area around a cinder cone, long since dead. I quickly learned that the hot sun is a never-ending force of nature, not to be underestimated. I drank at least a gallon of water every day. Professor Andrew Meigs gave me and two-dozen other students our task: Use the tools provided (field notebook, Brunton compass, rock hammer, hand lens and a contour map) to understand what happened to this brick-red hill in the middle of the desert.

Stepping over cacti (sit at your peril!) and even shards of obsidian from long-ago residents, I began training my eyes to notice important clues: the downward dip of cinder layers on the hill, the change in sediment and bedrock colors over distance. I used to overlook these subtle signs, but as I worked, they became critical. The rock hammer clanking on my belt and the hand lens hanging around my neck got me closer to small details, while my legs carried me around the landscape to understand the big picture. Above all, every observation from sediment color, rock composition and how far a layer inclined from horizontal had to be recorded in the orange field book and marked on the contour map.

The maps we created became the key to unraveling the cinder cone’s story. They enabled us to see a cross-section of the Earth under our feet, as though we had sliced down with an enormous knife and peeled the crust back to reveal its ancient face. We started to understand the Earth in three dimensions. We began to appreciate maps for what they are, our connection to the world beyond what we can experience directly through our five senses.

Those ten days in the Southern California desert opened my eyes. I learned how to challenge assumptions and drop expectations before coming to a conclusion about the history of a landscape, all through mapping. Above all, I learned that maps allow us to step back and gain perspective, illuminating patterns that we couldn’t see otherwise. The connections we make with maps produce solutions to some of our most pressing issues and even inspire discoveries. In more ways than one, maps provide a path through the unfamiliar, a priceless tool in such a dynamic world.

This love of maps shouldn’t be surprising for a budding geologist like me. Geology owes much of its existence to maps. In fact, the first geological map was created by a scientist who was intrigued by the coal seams of southeastern England. William Smith, a forefather of modern geology, developed the first geological map. He traveled on horseback, weighed down carriages with rock samples, meticulously wrote and re-wrote and deduced an explanation for the location, orientation and relative age of coal seams and strange figured stones (fossils) that no one understood.

Google Earth provided satellite images on which these axial data reveal the N-S alignment in three ruminant species: (A) Cattle. (B) Roe deer. (C) Red deer. Each pair of dots (located on opposite sites within the unit circle) represents the direction of the axial mean vector of the animals' body position at one locality. (From Begall, et al, 2008, PNAS, Magnetic alignment in grazing and resting cattle and deer)

With his map, Smith brought a deeper understanding to the beautiful countryside so often admired in British culture. He showed that it has a history, a story different than that of biblical origin, the prevailing explanation for the landscape at the time. His studies directly created the science of stratigraphy, the study of rock layers, and with it the rest of geology. Above all, he demonstrated the amazing power of connection and the power of perspective that maps provide.

Today, old maps seem almost quaint. We have Google Earth, which led to one of my favorite discoveries, one involving cows. Researchers used satellite images from Google Earth to survey the orientation of cows and roe deer as they bedded down in locations around the world. The scientists found that, when these animals graze or rest, they tend to line up with magnetic north. This was unknown before the study. Map technology demonstrated an unseen biological property: the behavior of some animals correlates with the lines of force in the Earth’s magnetic field. This connection opens up myriad questions about familiar animals that I thought I understood. It also raises questions about what the Earth’s magnetic field does to the human species. Can it influence our biology? If so, how?

Map of Late Cretaceous coastline (85Ma). (Image from Paleogeography and Geologic Evolution of North America)

Maps even shed light on social and cultural head-scratchers. In the southern United States, there’s a peculiar ribbon of counties across Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina that tend to vote Democratic in presidential elections. Prior to the 1965 Voting Rights Act, this pattern didn’t exist. Most black people did not vote. When researchers overlaid a geological map on the 2000, 2004 and 2008 county-by-county voting census, an intriguing picture came to light. During the Cretaceous Period (145-65 million years ago), the area to become Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina occupied the coastline of a tropical sea. Warm, shallow waters rich in organic material lapped the shore. The life and death of unfathomable numbers of plankton and other marine organisms produced vast deposits of chalk, which formed the basis for the cotton industry that boomed in America 65 million years later. After the end of voter discrimination nearly 50 years ago, the Democratic leanings of the black voters in this belt became apparent. Who knew that 100-million-year-old geologic history could affect voting patterns today?

Blue counties voted Democratic in the 2008 presidential election (Map: New York Times)

At the “baby field camp” in Southern California, we spent our last five days in a section called Poleta, high in the White Mountains. Trying to understand the gnarled, folded and faulted landscape beyond the first deceptive rise brought many of us to tears. I traced contacts (the boundaries between different rock types) over and over, drawing them where I thought they laid on the map. Eventually, it was necessary to hike out away from the folded hills to hypothesize what might have happened. I remember walking over the last hill, having a rough idea of my conclusions, only to find another fault that changed my thinking.

The sheer frustration of the exercise demonstrated another important point: Maps are hard. They force us to look with a different perspective, to ask tough questions and seek unexpected answers. But what else can we expect from a tool designed to both show and push boundaries?

______________________________

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

This video produced by Facebook, Degrees of Separation, shows how they did it.

In 2011, the researchers netted a dazzling array of fish from the Cuyuni River in Guyana, some never before seen by scientists. The challenge: how to make sense of the bounty. The answer: reach out to colleagues through the Internet.

Sidlauskas and his graduate student, Whitcomb Bronaugh, took photos of the fish and posted them to Facebook. Within 24 hours, they had identifications from dozens of colleagues around the world.

Mount Hood's crater is rimmed with unstable cliffs, which can collapse and send an avalanche of rock down the mountain. Timberline Lodge is located on the remnants of one such event. (Photo: Adam Kent)

Mount Hood last erupted more than 200 years ago, but at Crater Rock, not far from the summit, the signs of volcanic activity are unmistakable. Gas vents and hot springs emit sulfur fumes. Vapors rising from deep under the mountain carve snow caves, which can seem like sanctuaries for climbers but often hold deadly concentrations of CO2 and other gases. Rocks fall frequently from the steep unstable cliffs of the partially collapsed crater.

Odds are low that Oregon’s tallest mountain will erupt any time soon, but when it does, scientists have a pretty good idea of what will happen. Driven by the grinding of tectonic plates deep in the planet’s crust, hot magma will infuse cooler lava chambers closer to the surface (an event geologists call “recharge”). Pressure will build. Rocks will begin to crack.

In some volcanoes, not much happens after recharge. The lava chambers may be hotter and ready to burst, but the lid stays on, and the molten rock gradually cools. It takes quite a punch to force a mass the consistency of oatmeal up through miles of tortuous fractures.

Hood, however, is impatient. Within weeks of recharge, lava starts moving and gases start bubbling out through the crater. Melting snow and ice generate debris flows down the mountain’s flanks sweeping away forests and filling rivers with sand and rock. (In the distant past, such events have careened down the Hood River valley and across the Columbia River.) Eventually, lava emerges and snakes down the mountainsides, adding to Hood’s bulk and remaking its classic profile.

That’s been the story for more than a half-million years, says Adam Kent, Oregon State University geologist. When he first arrived in Oregon in 2003, the Australia native learned that while scientists from the U.S. Geological Survey’s Cascade Volcano Observatory knew a lot about hazards posed by eruptions, Hood’s underground plumbing remained largely a mystery.

Since then, Kent has analyzed the remnants of old lava flows to learn how the mountain behaves. He and post-doctoral researcher Alison Koleszar have climbed to the crater, brought samples back to their labs and squeezed clues from rocks. The chemical composition of Hood’s lava flows has remained amazingly uniform over the centuries, and they have found that the mountain may represent an extreme end of volcanic systems and may in fact be unique in the Cascades. Unlike Mount St. Helens, Mount Jefferson and others in this spectacular range, Hood doesn’t explode; it oozes.

Crystal Visions

Kent keeps a piece of Mount Hood in his office. This flat gray rock looks like some kind of exotic concrete. It sparkles with crystals. Irregular, coffee-colored spots about the size of a quarter dot its surface. Dark flecks of hornblende (composed of iron, calcium, silicon and magnesium) are scattered across its surface like pepper on a fried egg.

“When this rock came to the surface,” Kent says, “it was partly liquid. It records information about the last stage of the eruption. But if you want to know more about the long-term conditions in the crust where this magma was being stored, you need to look at the crystals.”

Like tree rings, crystals grow from the inside out over time, says Kent. At their heart are the original minerals — formed out of common elements such as calcium, iron, silicon, magnesium and aluminum. As hot rock pulses up from below, crystals go through warming and cooling phases. Mineral layers form on the outside edges and create a record of temperature, pressure and chemistry. Each ring tells a story about a new pulse of melted rock that cycled the crystal through heating and cooling.

This false color image of a feldspar crystal embedded in a rock from Mount Hood shows the rings generated by pulses of magma from deep in the crust. The outer edge was created during the event that caused the mountain to erupt. (Photo: Adam Kent)

Crystals also trap tiny remnants of some of the original parent material, melted rock that is created as tectonic plates grind against each other. Analysis of these trapped particles — what geologists call “melt inclusions” — provides a picture of the minerals and volatile gases (water, carbon dioxide, sulfur, chlorine and fluorine) that emerge from deep in the crust and can give a mountain shape and personality. When concentrations of those gases are high, explosive eruptions are more likely.

To find out what distinguishes Hood from its neighbors, Kent, Koleszar and their team separate crystals from surrounding rock. In the Oregon State geology lab, they subject samples of the mountain to diamond-tipped saws, acids and devices that pound stones into dust or polish them to a fine sheen (Polishing can be pricey. Grinding pastes that contain diamond particles can cost upwards of $300 for half an ounce). They separate crystals further by exposing rock fragments to magnetic fields or dropping them in dense liquids.

“Some samples are crumbly and fall apart easily,” says Koleszar. “Those are harder to work with. Nice clean pure volcanic glass is great. It polishes like butter. It’s so soft compared to some of the minerals we use.”

Once separated, sliced and mounted on slides, crystals undergo analysis by electron beam that reveals fine structural details or laser and mass spectrometry that tell scientists what trace elements are present in each crystal ring. The result is an accumulation of evidence that allows geologists to explain Hood’s eruption process and compare the mountain to other volcanoes.

More Fizz, No Pop

In a paper published in the Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research in 2012, Koleszar and co-authors Kent, William Scott of the USGS and Paul Wallace of the University of Oregon described their findings. They reported that Hood’s magma contains the ingredients for explosive eruptions: magma pumped regularly into the mountain from below, a chemical profile similar to that of other explosive volcanoes and high levels of volatile gases. However, at Hood, those gases tend to escape readily like fizz from an open can of soda. That’s because a 100 degree increase in temperature — an increase that happens as hot rock flows into magma chambers under the mountain — makes the flowing rock five to 10 times less thick.

“Imagine you are blowing into a straw in a milkshake,” says Koleszar. “It’s so thick that the bubbles don’t come out right away, but when they do, they burst and throw stuff up in the air. Compare that to blowing into a straw in a glass of milk. Bubbles just come easily to the surface. That’s more like what we see at Mount Hood.”

Alison Koleszar, left, and Tyler Lomax, a junior from Albany, Oregon, collected rock samples from the 590,000-year-old Cloud Cap lava flow on the eastern side of Mount Hood. Composition of the rocks there is thought to reflect the original parent magma. Koleszar and Lomax also trekked through lava fields on the southern flank where flows are less than 30,000 years old. (Photo: Jeff Basinger)

Mount Hood may be unique in the Cascades, but it joins a select group of volcanoes worldwide (Mount Unzen in Japan, Soufriére Hills Volcano in Montserrat, Mount Dutton in Alaska) that tend to ooze instead of explode. Nevertheless, volcanoes can also demonstrate both types of behavior, and there’s no guarantee that Hood will always operate as it has in the past. Two well-known explosive volcanoes — Mount Pelée in the Caribbean and Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines — have exhibited both types of eruptions. Moreover, geologists know that pulses of hot magma, which occur at Mount Hood, can cause explosions such as the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption.

“We’re still trying to figure out why Hood only erupts right after a recharge event,” says Koleszar. “It may be that it just doesn’t have the oomph to erupt at other times.

“It seems like such a boring volcano,” she adds. “It erupts the same thing all the time; it doesn’t seem to do anything interesting. It’s an icon, it’s a beautiful volcano and it’s Oregon’s volcano. But when you start to tease things apart a little bit, it does get interesting, exactly because it is so boring.”

_____________________________

Download an animation of magma rising into a volcanic crater. Scientists can sample the resulting airborne plume to understand how the volcano is likely to erupt. (Produced by the Johnston Ridge Observatory at Mount St. Helens in collaboration with the U.S. Geological Survey)

Gary Klinkhammer (Photo: Susan Klinkhammer)

“The Arctic in a lot of ways is more like a big lake than an ocean. It’s more isolated,” says Klinkhammer, a professor in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences at Oregon State University. “Following carbon in the Arctic turns out to be a very powerful thing,” he adds, because it can reveal details about the chemical and geological processes that drive ocean life.

But Klinkhammer felt hampered by his equipment. His analytical tools could produce a lump-sum measurement of carbon, not a detailed picture of the dissolved and particulate forms that emanate from sources such as forests or farms, peat bogs or cities.

Following his Arctic expedition, he got to work on a better way to analyze water quality. What he learned about tracking carbon and other materials led him to create a Corvallis-based technology company that is advancing water-quality protection in the United States and abroad.

Today, in addition to his role as director of the W. M. Keck Collaboratory for Plasma Spectrometry at OSU, Klinkhammer is founder and chief scientific officer of ZAPS Technologies, which designs and sells an analytical system, LiquID™, based on his research. Through optical analysis of flowing water, the system can rapidly monitor over 100 constituents in water-supply and wastewater systems and the environment.

“If you’re looking at the Santiam River or something like that, you don’t really know where that carbon is coming from,” he says. “Some of it’s coming from groundwater. Some of it’s coming from a reservoir. There are multiple sources that it can come from.”

Illustration by Teresa Hall

Pinpointing the identity and source of organic matter and other constituents is a critical step in protecting public health. For example, storms and floodwaters can pollute drinking-water supplies with sediment and disease-causing microbes. One of the most famous cases occurred in 1993 when the microbe cryptosporidium contaminated the drinking-water supply of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The Centers for Disease Control estimates that more than 400,000 people got sick and 69 died.

Klinkhammer’s analytical innovation provides both rapid optical analysis and online display of data. It monitors chlorophyll, algae, E. coli and other materials 24/7 in real-time. It can even track inorganic materials such as nitrate, chlorine and ammonia.

Currently, ZAPS employs more than 20 people and has installed monitoring systems in Corvallis, Albany, Seattle and Lafayette, Indiana. Others are scheduled for San Diego and Australia.

Klinkhammer started working with sensors as a graduate student at the University of Rhode Island. His goal then was to locate hydrothermal vents on the vast mid-Atlantic ridge. In his research, he has used water-quality analysis to locate hydrothermal vents in the Antarctic and to understand chemical processes in the oceans, including the Columbia River plume off the Oregon coast.

Thus was born the biofuels industry — and also the first known barbecue.

Illustration: Celia Johnson

The name of that cave, Wonderwerk, means “miracle” in the Afrikaans language, and indeed biofuels were a miracle. From cooking to heating and light, fire aided the evolution of the human race. The biofuels industry even preceded Homo sapiens and anatomically modern humans by about 800,000 years.

Over time, barbecue techniques made steady progress, achieving ultimate perfection in South Carolina pulled pork. However, despite their importance and a few innovations like fireplaces and metallurgy, biofuel technologies tended to stagnate for about 999,000 years. In the developed world, biofuels were eventually dwarfed by fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas, and challenged more recently by solar, nuclear, wind and even wave energy.

Now, we’ve come full circle.

Biofuels are back, hotter than ever, the source of billions of dollars in new investments. From corn ethanol to biodiesel and now forest products, biofuels are often touted as a sustainable fuel source that will lessen our dependence on imported oil and provide domestic jobs. It’s ideally seen as win-win, and researchers all over the world are trying to perfect new technologies, increase efficiency and make biofuels more cost-effective.

It has also been proposed that biofuels could help mitigate climate change — that substituting them for their fossil-fuel counterparts would reduce “greenhouse gas” emissions into the atmosphere — but that assumption is facing challenges both locally and globally.

Jet Fuel

This is not your caveman’s biofuel. A U.S. Department of Agriculture program that was announced last year will bring $80 million to Pacific Northwest industry and universities, $9.8 million of it to Oregon State University, for a diverse program of research and education to create aviation fuel out of tree plantations and low-value wood products. Through the miracle of cellulosic ethanol, some jets of the future will fly on fuel made from Pacific Northwest trees.

Illustration: Celia Johnson

“We could take material that isn’t now being used and create a new billion-dollar industry in the Pacific Northwest,” says John Sessions, a distinguished professor of forest engineering at Oregon State and principal investigator working on the Northwest Aviation Renewables Alliance.

“At the same time, we could help thin forests that are unhealthy and overcrowded, benefit wildlife habitat, reduce the risk of catastrophic fire and provide some badly needed jobs in communities that have lost their historic base in timber production,” Sessions says. “This won’t solve all of the nation’s energy concerns, and we shouldn’t say that it will. But it could make an important contribution.”

Sessions is quick to point out that “not all biofuels are created equal” and that thinning forests will cost substantially more than just using residues from existing logging operations — although the cost issue would look much better if commercial timber from small trees were harvested along with residue. One of OSU’s primary roles in the new initiative is to identify ways to get wood out of the forests more efficiently, and Sessions says that cutting logistical costs by 30 percent or more is a reasonable target.

However, questions about the modern biofuels industry have been raised almost since its inception, and as the debate enters the forest-products industry, it’s getting more intense. Cost is a big issue. So is what many ecologists consider the single most serious environmental threat in the world today — global warming, or the greenhouse effect.

Carbon Emissions

Some early proponents of biofuels suggested that they could be “carbon neutral” or even better, meaning they will not compound concerns about greenhouse warming and might even reduce it. Since they are produced from crops or trees that “sequester” carbon from the atmosphere as they grow, the theory was that sequestration would offset most or all of the carbon they release when they are turned into one type of fuel or another.

Illustration: Celia Johnson

“Different sides in this debate tend to pick the numbers that best support their arguments,” says Mark Harmon, a professor of forest science at OSU and one of 18 researchers in the nation advising the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on biogenic carbon. “The truth is more nuanced.”

The bottom line, Harmon says, is that almost any harvest of existing forest trees will cause a net increase of carbon to the atmosphere and that it may take decades or even centuries to “pay it back” with future tree growth. For global-warming concerns that are real and immediate, that’s a problem.

“This is a dilemma, and there won’t be any magic fix,” he says. “Forests are renewable, but only over very long time spans. Biofuels from tree harvesting would create a carbon debt that would be very difficult to pay back, like borrowing on one credit card to pay off another. The enthusiasm for them may have gotten ahead of the science.”

Harmon has estimated that, in an Oregon Coast Range stand, if you removed solid woody biofuels for the reduction of catastrophic fire risk and used them to produce cellulosic ethanol, it would take 339 years to reach a break-even point in carbon sequestration.

Another study last year at OSU, the largest and most comprehensive yet done on the effect of biofuel production from West Coast forests, echoed these concerns. It found that an emphasis on bioenergy would increase carbon-dioxide emissions from these forests at least 14 percent, if the efficiency of such operations were optimal. Harvest increases, for any reason, would result in increases in greenhouse emissions.

An analysis just published in the journal Global Change Biology/Bioenergy raised even more doubts, if forest biomass were to reach its ultimate potential. The authors, who included Beverly Law, a professor of global change forest science at OSU, wrote that a major global commitment to forest-biomass energy “would result in a reduction of biomass pools that may take decades to centuries to be paid back by fossil fuel substitution, if paid back at all.”

Reported emission savings from forest bioenergy are based on erroneous assumptions, they added, and a large biofuels industry would push forest management to ever-shorter rotation lengths, with depleted soil nutrients and fertility, increased erosion and flooding, and degraded fish habitat in streams. Even the economics may become more difficult, according to this analysis. In Europe, where bioenergy is subsidized, the cost of woody biomass from conifers surged in price from 300 percent to 600 percent between 2005 and 2010.

“Based on review of the literature, the paper concluded that large-scale bioenergy production from forests is neither sustainable nor greenhouse-gas neutral,” says Law, who is also a co-author of the National Research Council report on methods for quantifying and verifying greenhouse-gas emissions. “These issues have not been thought out very fully.”

By the Numbers

That’s about the same perspective held by William Jaeger, an OSU professor of agricultural and resource economics who has studied the economics of biofuels for the past five years.

“Biofuels were being seriously promoted before two main areas were thoroughly analyzed,” Jaeger says. “Those areas are net carbon analysis and economic constraints. People looked at this somewhat superficially. They said, ‘We can grow our own energy; why buy it from Saudi Arabia?’”

Biofuels, he says, were seen at first as such a win-win by most groups that they engendered almost no opposition. Political leaders loved them, environmental groups went along, jobs were being created and crop prices went up for farmers.

Under Jaeger’s analysis, however, the facts are less rosy. He analyzed ethanol produced from crops and switchgrass cellulose, including some approaches that are simpler and even less costly than the current move toward forest-based cellulosic ethanol. Jaeger concluded that existing policies have been very costly, produce negligible reductions in fossil fuel use and increased greenhouse-gas emissions.

His bottom line?

For complex reasons, the growth of a biofuel industry is doing almost nothing to reduce use of fossil fuels. And if you wanted to reduce gas consumption by 1 percent, U.S.-produced biofuels would cost 20 to 31 times more than energy-efficiency improvements. Meanwhile, the cost of taxpayer subsidies for some of these programs is extraordinary: Current ethanol subsidies to operate a 100-million-gallon ethanol plant translate to about $1 million per job, per year. Depending on the type of biofuel, there are risks of local pollution, heavier demands on land use and higher food prices for the poor.

Will some of the research being done around the world, and in the Pacific Northwest, change that? Some researchers believe it will. At least incremental improvements in efficiency and cost are probable. Whether they will be enough to offset the huge obstacles is more problematic. But while subsidizing a whole industry right now is questionable, even Jaeger points out that investment in research often has a very high payoff.

Forest Investment

“Until we work on them, we really won’t know what improved technologies will be able to do,” says Claire Montgomery, an OSU professor of forest resources. “And some of these costs have to be kept in perspective. We’re spending billions of dollars to protect our access to fossil fuels, and the cost of fire suppression in the U.S. has tripled since the mid-1990s to $1 billion a year.”

Wood or Oil?

The research cited here shows what some of those consequences, good and bad, might be when we
transform wood, a carbohydrate renewable over a scale of years to centuries, into heat or fuel.
Read more…

Other issues aside, Montgomery says, Pacific Northwest forests and rural communities are struggling. Decades of fire suppression have led to overcrowded forests, insect and disease epidemics are increasing, rural communities have high unemployment levels, and there’s little money to do anything about it. A biofuels industry could help all of these.

In her research, Montgomery is trying to identify where a supply of wood that could fuel an industry most closely matches up with the communities that need help. “Displacing fossil fuels is good,” she says. “Creating jobs is good. Helping rural communities is good.”

But a biofuels industry is not simple, certainly not as simple as once envisioned. And the issues of greenhouse warming, high societal costs and other environmental concerns are not easily dismissed.

Biofuels still make for a great barbecue. But it’s safe to say the caveman who invented this industry a million years ago had no idea, before it was all over, just how complicated the business might get.

California coast range newts in amplexus. (Photo: http://dipperanch.blogspot.com)

Ambling along the oaky trails at Finley Wildlife Refuge last Saturday morning — one of the first days without rain in a long, long time — my two friends and I paused at the edge of a pond along Woodpecker Loop.  Just under the murky surface, several rough-skinned newts were swimming in slow motion, their bodies undulating in rhythm with the rippling of the water and the dappling of the sun.

“Hey, they have two tails!” Lorraine pointed out. We realized, all at once, that each newt was in fact two newts, one atop the other. These weren’t just newts lazing around in the sun. They were mating. When I got home, I Googled “newt mating.” The term “amplexus” is what biologists call this behavior, which involves a lot of chin rubbing and sometimes goes on for days before the male deposits his sperm to fertilize the female’s eggs. That cold Latin noun seemed like an impoverished descriptor for the dancelike fluidity of the newts’ courtship. And it offers a huge clue to why ordinary people often have a hard time relating to, or believing in, science. Tell someone you witnessed newts in “amplexus” and watch their eyes glaze over. But tell them you saw newts in “embrace” (the English translation of the Latin), and they’ll want to know more. The explanation for the behavior may be biologic. But the pathway to understanding is, for most of us, more poetic.

This, in a nutshell, is the challenge that Kathleen Dean Moore, an environmental philosopher of national reputation, has taken on at Oregon State University. Last night, Moore and her colleagues Allen Thompson (coeditor of Ethical Adaptation to Climate Change just released by MIT Press) and Carly Lettero of OSU’s Environmental Humanities Initiative, hosted more than 40 scientists, graduate students, science educators and science writers on campus for conversation and nascent collaboration. Co-sponsored by OSU’s Research Office, the gathering brought together researchers and scholars to talk creatively about the subject that unites their work: climate change. Scientists of oceans, rivers, forests, mountains, plants and wildlife met scholars of philosophy, history, communications, education and human health, briefly sharing their current research endeavors with one another. Then, over beer, wine and smoked salmon, they began to talk about new ways of thinking about and working on the looming crisis threatening our planet and our survival.

Joking that he was happy to see OSU’s “climate rogue’s gallery” assembled in one place, Rick Spinrad, vice president for research, kicked off the event by saying, “No single discipline can respond effectively alone.”

Moore, coeditor of Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, expanded on the urgency of talking and working across disciplines, the necessity of merging the empirical and the cultural in both conversation and action. Science is only half of the persuasion equation, she said. To get the average person to believe in climate change and, more importantly, to act on that belief, it’s not enough to pile more and more data onto their plates. Rather, the data (the way the world is) must be linked to values (what we ought to do). This “normative premise” derives from what we care about most deeply. For most of us, Moore said, it’s our children. This shared cherishing of children is the bridge, she said, that can carry us over the political chasm swallowing up so much of our national conversation these days.

“We need to create a global moral consensus that it’s wrong to wreck the world,” Moore told the group. “We have to tell the stories of climate change in ways that make people cry.”

Oceanographer Alan Mix added his voice: “Scientists are admitting that we’re never going to win the argument on a scientific basis — always thinking in terms of evidence, data points and squiggly lines on graphs.”

Moore summed up the event by encouraging “creative collaboration to amplify the social impacts” of scientific discovery. “It’s not enough to just do our own work,” she told the group. “We have to make sure our work is making a difference out in the world.”

What’s needed, she seems to be saying, is a sort of scholarly amplexus: an embrace of the sciences with the humanities toward renewal and restoration of life on Earth.

For more information, contact Carly Lettero, carly.lettero@oregonstate.edu, coordinator of the Environmental Humanities Initiative.

James Cassidy

So, just who is this mysterious man of mulch? Although Cassidy is well-known at Oregon State University, both as a soil scientist and an instructor, he also has a not-so-secret identity: He’s a pop star. Cassidy plays bass for Information Society, a free-style electronic band, which reached popularity in the late 1980s. He still draws upon his skills as a performer while teaching students at Oregon State about crop and soil science.

“When I quit the music business,” Cassidy says, “I realized that I had learned a lot about public speaking, working with an audience and knowing how to read people.” He often compares teaching to performing music. Both, he says, require performers to be absolutely dedicated to their craft. As an instructor at OSU, Cassidy uses his abilities to connect with audiences and inspire them about science.

From the Land of 10,000 Lakes

Cassidy hails from the Twin Cities of Minnesota. He describes himself growing up as a nerdy kid who wanted to escape the suburban ghetto. In 1981, he and few high school friends started Information Society, reinterpreting hip hop and rock styles from the East and West Coast into a new electronic fusion. Information Society focused on a critique of popular consumer culture. “We were laughed at in Minnesota,” Cassidy recalls.” People were like, ‘Who are these guys wearing multi-colored jumpsuits?’ Everybody hated us, which meant we knew that we were onto something.”

In October 1988, their hit song, “What’s on your mind? (Pure Energy),” reached No. 1 on Billboard magazine’s dance chart and No. 3 on the hot 100 pop chart. An accompanying music video became a breakout on MTV. But the band soared to even greater popularity in Brazil, where the anti-establishment message resonated with a generation of young Brazilians. “We were one of the first western bands to come down there,” Cassidy says. When Information Society first arrived at the Sao Paulo Airport, their plane was mobbed by thousands of screaming fans. “When we were driving to our hotel. The cab driver had the radio on. Every single station had Information Society playing on it.” The band toured the country twice. At the Rock-n-Rio music festival in 1991, Cassidy played in front of 135,000 fans.

James Cassidy is surrounded by tools of the trade. The gold record, in front of the tractor, commemorates the sale of the first 500,000 copies of Information Society’s first record. (Photo: Dennis Wolverton)

By the early 1990s, Cassidy had scaled a cultural Mt. Everest. “In our media-induced and celebrity-obsessed culture,” he says, “the highest level you can obtain is to be some sort of a rock star.” But for Cassidy, this popularity had come at a cost. A decade of tours had created tension within the members of the band. “People ask what it’s like to be a star. It’s your job to say it’s great, when really you’re empty and lonely.” He felt like a salesman peddling the same consumer culture that Information Society rejected. Disillusioned, Cassidy quit the band in 1993. He wasn’t sure, however, what to do next. “I was done with the music business,” he adds. “I was ready for reality.”

Looking for a fresh start, Cassidy moved to Oregon in 1993. After browsing career catalogs at his local public library, he decided to become a fish farmer. “I knew that I liked nature and the outdoors,” he recalls. But he was looking for more than a career. After spending thirty years immersed in the money driven recording industry, he was searching for a deeper meaning of life. “I intuited,” he explains, “ that the outdoors was where the truth was.”

Coming down to earth

Cassidy found truth in a soggy farm field, on the banks of Corvallis’ Oak Creek. He had been at Oregon State University for two years, studying stream ecology and fisheries under the tutelage of Stan Gregory, professor in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife. As an undergraduate, Cassidy had become fascinated with the interconnectedness of ecosystems. The tangibility of the natural world impressed him, especially when he compared it with the artificial façade of the recording industry. He wondered how water quality was affected by forests, animals and human activity.

In 1999, he collaborated with other Fisheries and Wildlife students to investigate contamination in Oak Creek, a small stream that runs through OSU’s agricultural fields. During a heavy rainstorm, he tromped out to take water samples from the flooded creek. As he filled plastic bottles with water, he started to wonder where it was all really coming from.

That’s when, soaked from head to toe, he had an epiphany. “It suddenly occurred to me,” he says, “that the water wasn’t from the rain drops falling into the creek.” The water had traveled over and through soil in the surrounding fields. Dirt was the missing link in Cassidy’s holistic understanding of the water cycle.

But soil, Cassidy says, isn’t important only in water quality; it touches every part of our lives. “Soil is the nexus of everything. It’s where everything really does come together.”

Popular culture dismisses dirt as, well, beneath us. A person trapped in poverty is “dirt poor.” A grimy old T-shirt is “soiled” or “dirty.” In our hypoallergenic culture, obsessed with perpetual cleanliness, we have forgotten the true value of soil. Dirt, Cassidy explains, comprises so much more than grains of sediment.

It’s alive.

To Cassidy, soil is a four dimensional complex habitat with a direct relationship to human health. Just a pinch can contain a billion or more organisms. “And 99.99 percent of them,” he says, “we don’t know who they are or what they do. Every atom in your body has gone through the soil system billions of times over. Everything got its start in soil and everything goes back to it.” [Editor's note: OSU soil scientist David Myrold leads the Terragenome project, an international effort to sequence the genes of all soil microorganisms.)

Cassidy grounded himself in the study of soil, earning a master’s degree in crop and soil science from Oregon State in 2002. After graduation, he worked as a researcher in the OSU Soil Physics Laboratory and continued his investigation into farm field filtration. He worked with soil physicist Maria Dragila to determine how vole holes affect the filtration and transport of water on farm fields.

Teaching and Tilling

Cassidy’s former career as a bassist seemed another lifetime ago. But, in 2004, a chance teaching gig threw Cassidy back into the past. A professor asked him to step in as a lecturer in an introductory soil science class. Cassidy agreed.

James Cassidy teaches students about the real-life applications of soil science.

As he entered the lecture hall, the former rock star felt his blood pound. Eager eyes peered at him. He stood behind the podium before ninety students. The crowd buzzed with excitement. He was back on stage. “I was comfortable,” Cassidy says, “I could relax. I was funny. I knew how to reach them.” Every fall and winter, he gets back on stage and teaches basic introductory soil science to fresh undergraduates.

As he lectures, Cassidy draws upon his recent experiences as a student. He understands that every student approaches learning differently. “I know what it means to be a person who doesn’t know everything yet, because I didn’t go from high school being smart into college being smart. I was a poor student in high school, and I had to recreate myself as a student [in college]. So I’m still a student when I’m teaching. I know what they’re going through.” His zeal for soil piques the interest of his class as he deploys a variety of props (spray bottles, metal chains, sponges) to help his students understand theoretical concepts.

Cassidy acknowledges that many students are fascinated by his former career. “They think that I have some insight into popular culture, which they have been trained to worship, “ he says. “Yet here I am talking about soil. [It] makes them judge which is more important. And they realize that soil is more important, actually.”

To drive the point home, Cassidy has his students go out into the field and get their hands dirty. He’s created service-learning projects to expose students to the real-life applications of soil science. Students have tilled soil, developed sustainable cemeteries and taught children about soil. He says that service-learning projects provide students with a unique platform for learning. “Probably the best way of learning is experiencing. I developed these service learning projects to make them do something that is not possible in the lecture hall, in a book or online.”

Still Strumming

Pop star. Scientist. Teacher. James Cassidy somehow manages to wear all of these hats with confidence and ease. While he still enjoys the life of a musician, he prefers his current job. “My life has so much more meaning now,” he says. Being a musician prepared him for a pitch-perfect career as a professor. “I’m lucky to have the backstory,” he says, “that has given me the experiences to allow me the opportunity to reinvent myself after the end of the band.” He gathered a set of skills completely applicable to another life.

But Cassidy has not forgotten his roots. The original members of Information Society reunited in 2006 and get together every other year to tour South America. They always return to Brazil. “We can still go down there and play in front of 10,000 fans,” he says. “It’s really fun because it’s not my life anymore. It’s just a trip down memory lane.”

While Cassidy’s careers have never converged, he says that his fans are aware of his new career. Onstage, he wears a shirt with “Soil” emblazoned on the front. Fans approach him afterwards and ask him about it. “It gets the fans thinking about what’s going on with the soil,” he says.

In July 2012, the band will return to Brazil to play, once again, in front of thousands. Until then, Oregon State students can enjoy Cassidy’s talented presentations in the lecture hall.

Read more about Cassidy’s service-learning projects in the Corvallis Gazette Times
http://www.gazettetimes.com/news/local/article_924c7c0e-21fc-11e0-a25f-001cc4c03286.html

I am lousy at poker, but that doesn’t keep me from participating in the worldwide gamble we call climate change. It’s a game of chance with deadly consequences. With each passing year, we up the ante by adding more greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere and tipping the scales in favor of a drastically different future.

Click to download the PDF

Some of the cards are already on the table: receding glaciers, rising sea levels, rampant forest pests, eroding coastlines, intense storms and spreading drought. By themselves, such trends are not the definitive signature of a changing climate. Taken together, however, they demonstrate that we are indeed living on a new planet, as author Bill McKibben argues. Here, the chances are diminishing that future generations will be able to grow enough food, keep people healthy, ensure public safety and enjoy our rich ecological heritage.

This issue of Terra shows what some Oregon scientists, foresters, farmers, public health officials and planners are doing to prepare. They face a moving target, because as they work, knowledge continues to evolve. Two recent examples from OSU suggest the scale of the challenge. A 2011 report in the journal Science by OSU professor Andreas Schmittner and colleagues concluded that the most drastic climate scenario posed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is less likely than had previously been judged. Contrary to some criticism, they did not rule out major consequences from small changes in climate.

Earlier, Alan Mix, one of Schmittner’s colleagues on the Science paper, co-authored a report in Nature Geoscience that throws cold water on a hypothesis involving the source of atmospheric carbon that ballooned after the last Ice Age. The evidence from a deep-ocean site about 70 miles off southwest Oregon was conclusive: The carbon came from some place other than the northeast Pacific, which scientists had considered the most likely location. The findings, said Mix, left them puzzled.

These might seem like arcane footnotes to arguments among specialists, but on them and other details rest our understanding of how the planet works. Much of that knowledge is in hand, but while scientists have reached wide agreement about the outlines of a changing climate, the picture is still coming into focus.

What do current trends mean for the rest of us? Here’s a view from writers and scientists assembled last fall by OSU’s Spring Creek Project for Ideas, Nature and the Written Word. In the Blue River Declaration, they wrote: “A truly adaptive civilization will align its ethics with the ways of the Earth. A civilization that ignores the deep constraints of its world will find itself in exactly the situation we face now, on the threshold of making the planet inhospitable to humankind and other species.”

If you like to gamble, you might think that nature is bluffing or that we’ve got the rules all wrong and we can go on changing the chemistry of the atmosphere and the oceans. With every passing year, it appears that nature is serious. We might not have every rule nailed down yet, but this is a game in which the losers are likely to be our children.

What links these four students and their diverse scientific interests is climate change. Lindsey Thurman, Sarah Frey, Sihan Li and Seth Wiggins have been granted fellowships from the Northwest Climate Science Center, a program of the U.S. Department of the Interior hosted by the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute (OCCRI) at Oregon State University.

“The purpose of the fellowships is to support promising graduate students whose research is relevant to the Climate Science Center,” says Phil Mote, OCCRI director.

Their academic talents are exceeded only by the energy with which they engage the world. Here are their stories.

Little Nooks and Crannies

Her forest-green Toyota pickup was packed to the gills when Sarah Frey climbed in and steered toward I-90, trailer in tow. The Vermonter was in a bit of a daze. A chance encounter barely a month before had launched her on an unplanned journey across the United States, destination, Oregon.

It all started in 2008 at an American Ornithologists’ Union conference in Portland, where Frey ran into OSU forest ecologist Matt Betts, an acquaintance from an earlier population-modeling workshop. After five years of tramping around the Americas and Pacific Islands doing fieldwork for conservation nonprofits — studying hawk migration in Nevada, banding owls in Michigan, investigating avian pox among forest birds in Hawaii, tracking tropical birds in Ecuador — she had recently finished her master’s thesis at the University of Vermont on Bicknell’s thrush, a rare, high-elevation species. She hadn’t yet mapped out her next move. Then Betts sprung a fellowship offer.

Sarah Frey (Photo: OSU Marketing Communications)

“How about starting your Ph.D. next month?” he asked. A few weeks later, she was enrolled in the College of Forestry with a minor in Ecosystem Informatics.

For the next three field seasons, she monitored birds in the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest. From mid-May through early July, she and other researchers climbed the rugged slopes, from creek bed to mountaintop, documenting behaviors and population densities of about 50 species. “We went out to 184 sites, stood, listened, and looked for 10 minutes at each site,” she explains. “During 2011, we carried out fiberglass poles and PVC pipe to all of the points for installing temperature sensors.”

Enduring the brutal conditions of fieldwork is an occupational hazard for Frey. Ever since the iconic behavioral ecologist Bernd Heinrich (Mind of the Raven) turned her on to birds during an ornithology field trip when Frey was an undergrad, she has thrown herself into more adventures than Indiana Jones. Braving the tropical forests of Queensland, Australia, for a study-abroad program was one. Another was her Bicknell’s thrush study, which took her up and down a different Appalachian mountain every day for two breeding seasons. Her studies also have taken her to Switzerland where she recently spent two months working with a statistical modeler at the Swiss Ornithological Institute.

Frey’s OCCRI-funded research challenges certain longstanding assumptions that underpin today’s species-climate models. Typically, these models are based on “bioclimatic envelopes” — that is, the mix of temperatures, precipitation levels and other climate variables within which species thrive. She wants to know what other factors might be driving species extinctions and biodiversity in a time of shifting climate. How important is vegetation, for instance? What about competition among species? Where does predation fit in? How do microclimates help birds adapt to climate change?

One of the things she’s investigating is the role of temperature in small-scale species distributions. The buffering capacity of “microclimatic refugia” (habitat havens she characterizes as “little nooks and crannies”) in mountainous terrain could be critical as birds make adjustments to a fluctuating environment in nesting, breeding and foraging.
“I’m trying to tease apart the main drivers of where species occur,” she says. “Most scientists think climate is the primary driver at large scales, while vegetation and other species are the main drivers at small scales.”

To find out, she compared the influence of microclimate on distribution dynamics for three species with different migratory strategies: hermit warbler (a neotropical migrant), chestnut-backed chickadee (a resident) and Pacific wren (a partial migrant).

“There have been very few rigorous tests of these alternative hypotheses,” Frey notes. “Uncovering the relative importance of different drivers of species distribution — climate, land cover, competitors, predators — is critical for both ecological theory and environmental policy.”

Worldwide Weather Warriors

College student Sihan Li gazed in astonishment at the terracotta warriors, massed by the thousands on a silent, earthen battlefield near Xi’an in central China. Little did the Yunnan University undergrad know that soon she would be marshaling her own army from a computer lab in Oregon. But unlike Emperor Qin’s clay troops, built to do battle in the afterlife, Sihan Li’s flesh-and-blood legions are taking up arms against the here-and-now threat of climate change. And instead of spears and swords, her climate warriors are wielding keyboards and barometers.

Li’s army, enlisted by a global project called climateprediction.net, comprises more than 50,000 weather geeks. They have volunteered to collect information on local precipitation, temperature, humidity and other weather events and load it onto their home computers. Li’s job is to analyze the data from the western United States — one of three regions being studied worldwide with funding from the U.S. Geological Survey. To do that, she is using BOINC (Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing), a software system for volunteer computing.

Sihan Li (Photo: OSU Marketing Communications)

“Usually, communities feel removed from the research going on around them,” notes Li, who goes by Meredith. “But volunteers for climateprediction.net become personally involved and committed to the project.”

The experiment, characterized by Li as “unprecedented” in its scope and reach, is a perfect fit for this 23-year-old Ph.D. student in OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. To the young atmospheric scientist, only the colorful richness of humanity rivals topics like wind-ocean circulation dynamics and heat-flux transfer on the list of fascinating things to study and experience. As an undergraduate, Li explored the far corners of China with a train ticket and a backpack whenever she wasn’t taking classes and working on regional climate modeling. The ancient city of Xi’an, home of the Terracotta Army, enchanted her with its palpable sense of history. “You can almost smell the culture in the air,” she says.

Like humanity, climate is infinitely complex. So far, computer models designed to predict future climate scenarios have been hobbled by one of two problems: too broad a scope that glosses over the finer details of geography, or too narrow a range that fails to capture the larger context. The army of weather volunteers will remedy these deficiencies, Li says, by collecting data broadly and finely simultaneously. The result will be “super ensembles” — suites of large-scale simulations — for the western U.S., Europe and southern Africa.

“This research,” says Li, “is not only scientifically groundbreaking, but likely to provide the greatest value to date in assisting the western region as we attempt to cope with and plan for climate change.”

Along with Oxford University, OCCRI’s partner on the project, OSU is consulting closely with stakeholders, including the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, the California Department of Water Resources and the Water Utility Climate Alliance.

“Science is, in the end, to be of service to people — to make the world a better place for people to live in,” says Li.

Carbon, Cattle and Costs

These days, Seth Wiggins spends long hours staring at a computer screen in his lab at OSU. But the master’s student is not a natural habitue of chairs, swivel or otherwise. In 2009 his dead-accurate aim and rocket-fast arm won him a gold medal in Ultimate Frisbee at the World Games in Taiwan. The next year he pedaled his Giant OCR2 road bike from Seattle to New York, spinning 3,000 miles in six weeks, solo. The biggest challenge, he says, was getting enough calories. “I would go to these all-you-can-eat pancake places and eat them out of business,” he reports. “My record was 23.” Pancakes, that is. With butter and syrup.

Seth Wiggins (Photo: OSU Marketing Communications)

Soon after his cross-country ride, Wiggins got serious about his other passion — saving the planet — and enrolled in graduate school. But instead of choosing a field like forest ecology or conservation biology, the 27-year-old from Corvallis is taking a less-usual path to planetary protection: economics.

“What I care about are environmental issues, specifically climate change,” says Wiggins, who earned his bachelor’s in econ and international studies at the University of Oregon. “But in this society, things don’t happen unless money is attached.”

Take CO2 reduction, for example. Attaching a dollar figure to greenhouse gasses is the idea behind cap and trade, which lets companies exchange carbon credits on the free market. In Oregon, where rangelands comprise about one in nine acres, grasses soak up carbon dioxide by the ton. By capturing and holding (“sequestering”) CO2 from the atmosphere, Oregon’s vast rangelands create a powerful sink for pollutants that would otherwise be warming the atmosphere. If policymakers were to offer economic incentives to ranchers, Wiggins suggests, the state could lock up significant quantities of emissions every year.

“This is an enormous land resource,” says Wiggins. “Carbon sequestration on rangelands could potentially have a huge effect.”
To test that potential in the Pacific Northwest, he is looking at ranching operations across Oregon, Washington and Idaho with at least 100 acres and cattle sales grossing $10,000. Using a statistical model designed by Professor John Antle in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Wiggins is analyzing data from the most recent Census of Agriculture to weigh various assumptions — costs, returns, profits, and so on — that underlie the sequestration concept. The study’s goal is to find the optimal price point where ranchers could be persuaded to join a sequestration program and improve their land management practices.

“Currently, much of the rangeland is overgrazed,” says Wiggins. “It’s cheaper for ranchers to add more cows than to maintain healthy grasslands.”

Attractive economic incentives would encourage ranchers to adopt eco-friendly methods, such as rotational grazing or intensive pasturing — methods that allow soils to absorb carbon in the atmosphere, according to Wiggins. The way he sees it, practices that are affordable as well as environmentally sound allow people to align their actions with their values without taking a hit in the pocketbook.

“Right now there’s a disconnect between our values and our actions,” he says. “No one wants to leave a deteriorating environment to generations going forward, but many people act as if they do. Figuring out how to get people to act in accordance with their values seems incredibly interesting to me.”

Blue Crabs to Cascades Frogs

The little girl with the sunburned nose and whorl of sun-bleached hair felt as much at home swimming and diving in Florida’s Santa Rosa Sound as did the blue crabs she loved to trap. Since those carefree days on the Gulf Coast, Lindsey Thurman has stalked wildlife both cold-blooded and warm. She has monitored sea turtle nests from Pensacola to Alligator Point as an undergraduate at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Netted freshwater fish in Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge for the Florida Museum of Natural History. Sampled tissues from snakes and other reptiles in Ocala National Forest for the U.S. Geological Survey. Tracked carnivores in California’s Sierra Nevada range for a U.S. Forest Service study.

And she did all this before she was admitted to graduate school at OSU.

Lindsey Thurman (Photo: OSU Marketing Communications)

“I’m a field biologist at heart,” says the Ph.D. student in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, which she chose because of its No. 1 national ranking. “I’m fascinated by phylogeny — how species are arranged on the tree of life. I like the challenge, physically and mentally. I like the serenity of being out there by myself.”

These days, “being out there” means trekking through the Cascades, her backpack stuffed with topo maps and sampling kits for collecting live amphibians. In alpine ponds, creek beds and leaf litter, she seeks to discover how high-elevation frogs and salamanders are coping with climate change. With her yellow Lab, Sierra, loping merrily beside her, the 25-year-old is already blazing new trails in amphibian research. Her master’s project, carried out under the guidance of Assistant Professor Tiffany Garcia, revealed that long-toed salamanders have modified their egg-laying behavior to protect their progeny from the interplay of mounting temperatures and UV (ultraviolet) radiation, which are dangerously strong in the upper reaches. Instead of laying masses of eggs at the water’s surface, Thurman discovered, the salamanders are depositing their eggs singly under protective rocks or silt at high elevation.

For her new study, she’s pondering a wider range of variables — what she calls the “litany of threats” to the survival of mountain-dwelling amphibians.

“The impacts of environmental stressors on amphibian populations typically have been studied independently,” Thurman notes. “My study will contribute a broader analysis of climate change variables on multiple species across diverse, freshwater ecosystems.”

Scientists know that amphibians’ permeable skin and soft-shelled eggs make them hypersensitive to changes in temperature, moisture and UV rays. But there are all sorts of other questions demanding answers, Thurman says. For example, How do the animals’ “plastic” (quickly adaptable) developmental traits mitigate climate stressors? What happens to animals living in ephemeral ponds and meadows (those that dry up part of the year)? What is the impact of inter-species competition?

“I’ve always wanted to look at these variables on a landscape scale,” says Thurman. “Climate change is a global issue, and the variables are not independent. It’s hard to tease them apart.”

To find out how amphibians respond to the synergies of climate and high elevation, her ambitious study has three parts: field work, lab experiments and theoretical modeling. In the field, she will document frog and salamander populations in three watersheds at elevations above 1,000 meters from southern Oregon to southern British Columbia. In the lab, she will run climate and population scenarios (wetter, drier, hotter, more animals per tank) on the Cascades frog, the western toad, the Pacific chorus frog and the long-toed salamander. In the computer lab, she will use models to predict climate-driven changes in ecology and species distribution.

“Mountain amphibians are losing suitable breeding habitat rapidly,” Thurman says. “These species are going extinct at a disproportionate rate worldwide. With new baseline data, land managers will be able to fast-track conservation strategies for high-elevation freshwater ecosystems in time to make a difference.”

Millions depend on crops such as maize and rice, but production could fall in a warmer world. Oregon State University economist John Antle and an international network of colleagues are looking at the options for farmers in Africa, South Asia and North America.

In the Vihiga district of western Kenya, farms average little more than an acre. Corn is the dominant crop and source of sustenance, but most households run short six to 10 months of the year. They supplement with beans, groundnuts, bananas and vegetables and make money by selling milk, if they are lucky enough to own a cow. Throughout the country, corn production is declining, and researchers are urgently searching for drought-tolerant varieties to meet the needs of a growing population. For people already on the edge, adapting to climate change is a life-and-death matter.

In fact, scientists say, projections of a warmer, drier climate in East Africa could cut food production as it is currently practiced on 82 percent of the farms in Vihiga. This rural area doesn’t have far to fall. More than half of its farm households already earn less than $1 per person per day.

John Antle sees a better future for the people of Vihiga. By shifting from corn to more drought-tolerant crops such as sweet potatoes, farmers could offset much if not all of the negative impacts of climate change. Moreover, since sweet potatoes are high in vitamin A and the vines make good livestock fodder, they could improve nutrition for their families, feed their cattle and maintain milk production.

For the Oregon State University professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics (AREc), Vihiga demonstrates the need for climate-change adaptation policies. “Until now, adaptation has been politically incorrect in the climate world,” he says. “We see more and more evidence that real changes are happening, and we had better start thinking more about adapting.”

With a grant from the German international development agency GTZ, Antle and a research team from Wageningen University in the Netherlands and international research centers are evaluating the impacts of climate change on agriculture and the potential benefits of alternative cropping systems in East Africa. The simulation models that Antle and collaborators have developed over the past two decades are now being used by researchers globally to assess impacts of climate and other environmental changes in agriculture.

In the Great Plains and Midwest, he and co-author Susan Capalbo, head of AREc, have used these tools to study the potential for cropland to store carbon under conservation and reduced tillage systems. They are partnering with colleagues at OSU, Washington State, the University of Idaho and the U.S. Department of Agriculture to evaluate wheat in the Pacific Northwest under a changing climate (see “Against the Grain“).

Global Food Supplies

“For about a 150 years, the real price of wheat has gone down,” Antle says, even as global population has risen. “So why is that? Because supply has gone up faster than demand. That is the Green Revolution story, the scientific revolution that began after World War II and allowed agriculture to expand production. So the big question is, Are we now at a turning point where that’s no longer going to be true?”

Two factors — increasing demand from larger, more affluent populations; flattening growth in food supplies, as the Green Revolution bumps into production limits — are contributing to higher food prices. In the short term, he adds, there is still plenty of arable land available, and farmers can shift crops from fiber and fuel to food. But rising incomes in developing countries are already adding to demand and are likely to continue to do so well into the future.

He points to China, which, despite increasing incomes for a portion of its people, still has massive poverty. “People think that China is now this rich country. That’s wrong. There’s a small proportion of people in China who are well-off now, but if you get away from the coast, there are still a billion really, really poor people. That’s true for India and sub-Saharan Africa too.”

Those countries will continue to transition to a higher standard of living, he says. “For a long time, people have said, when the rest of the world tries to have a lifestyle like ours, we’ll be in trouble. Well, that’s what’s happening.”

On top of that, climate change poses an additional threat. Somalia and other parts of East Africa are already in their 16th year of drought. In Kenya, which hosts refugees fleeing violence and famine in Somalia, crop failures are common, and the country has to import corn to meet growing demand.

In their research, Antle and his colleagues combined available data on farm production in two Kenyan districts — Vihiga and Machakos — with the results of two climate models to estimate how new sweet potato varieties, milk, livestock and drought-tolerant corn might maintain food production and farm incomes in the future. Most previous studies of climate adaptation apply to large regions, such as whole countries. Their study was one of the first to compare the potential consequences of several climate change adaptation strategies for agriculture with this much detail.

“We’re trying to understand these systems, what characteristics make them work better or worse and what kinds of crop-breeding activities would work with changes in climate,” says Antle.

Illustration by Mary Susan Weldon

A changing changing climate in the Pacific Northwest will challenge the Willamette River watershed. The river is lined with cities and towns that are home to more than two-thirds of Oregon’s 3.8 million residents, and the valley’s population is expected to double by 2050, bringing additional stress to a system that has already seen more than 160 years of land-use change.

The river that provided food and transportation to native people for more than 9,000 years and helped to propel Euro-American settlers in the 1800s has undergone a transformation:
• Less than 40 percent of the river’s length is forested today, compared to 87 percent in 1850. Length of river channels in the mainstem has decreased by 25 percent, and wetlands throughout the valley have decreased 95 percent.
• Cities, industries and farms withdraw an average of more than 37,000 cubic feet of water every day from the Willamette. More than 80 miles of small tributary streams that historically flowed year-round now go dry in a moderately dry summer.
• The Willamette basin supports 35 native fish species but now contains an additional 31 non-native species.
• The Pacific Northwest’s climate is uncertain. Air surface temperatures are projected to increase by 0.2-1°F per decade, and precipitation timing and amounts may change, potentially leading to larger water withdrawals and increasing stress on some fish species.

While these trends seem dire, I and many other scientists have a vision of a restored, more resilient Willamette River. The rich and complex river channels witnessed by Lewis and Clark and other explorers in this region will not return, but rather, through deliberate design, we can see a more ecologically sound and livable future in the valley.

Getting there will require solid information about the distributions and habitats of native aquatic species, cold-water refuges, floodplain-inundation extents and opportunities for river and floodplain restoration. Researchers at Oregon State University, the University of Oregon, the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and other agencies are providing the basis for the future.

Meanwhile, restoration initiatives are already under way. The Special Investments Partnership of the Oregon Watershed Enhancement Board and the Willamette River Initiative of the Meyer Memorial Trust have partnered to conserve and restore floodplain forests and channel complexity in the Willamette River mainstem. State and federal agencies are conserving habitats and restoring altered habitats in response to the Willamette River Biological Opinion, Wildlife Mitigation Agreement and other programs. Watershed councils are addressing ecological conditions along the mainstem and the smaller tributaries where their previous efforts have focused. The Willamette Partnership and Clean Water Services have developed systems for carbon-credit and thermal-credit trading that could involve reforestation of riparian areas and floodplains. Cities and industries are exploring options to mitigate for thermal effects of water use and treatment practices. A diverse array of citizens’ groups, ranging from farmers to urban residents to industrial coalitions, are developing grass-roots programs to identify conservation opportunities and find ways to make them happen.

These programs build hope that the trends in resource loss observed in the Willamette River over the last 160 years may be reversed. The decisions we make today in our communities will shape the future of the Willamette River and the cities, farms and forests that depend on this river of change.

In the capital city of Salem, lawmakers are tapping the expertise of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute to help communities adapt to the state’s changing climatic landscape. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum, OSU Extension and Experiment Station Communications)

[Editor's Note: To learn how Oregon is coping with climate change, Terra magazine's Lee Sherman and OSU Extension photographer Lynn Ketchum traveled across the state talking to stakeholders in seven sectors identified in the Oregon Climate Assessment Report.]

The signs may be subtle so far, but the science is conclusive: Climate change is upon us. Even in the Pacific Northwest — this mythologized place of swirling ocean mists, moss-soft rainforests, crystalline rivers jumping with trout, reedy lakes teeming with waterfowl, juniper-perfumed grasslands bounding with pronghorns, shining cities wedded to sustainability — elevated levels of carbon dioxide are altering natural ecosystems and affecting human well-being year by year.

Globally, the science has been mounting for decades. A panel of more than 1,300 scientists worldwide has forecast a temperature rise of 2.5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century. The effects on individual regions will vary over time, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

To better understand those effects on Oregon, the Legislature charged the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute (OCCRI) in 2007 with making a biological, physical and sociological survey of existing climate-change research from Oregon’s coastal oceans to the Cascade Mountains to the high desert. The evidence was unequivocal.

“We are already experiencing the impacts of climate change in Oregon,” concludes the Oregon Climate Assessment Report (OCAR), edited by OSU researcher Kathie Dello and OCCRI Director Philip Mote, and presented to the Legislature in December 2010.

Since 1920, Oregon’s average temperature has gone up 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit, says OCCRI, a network of more than 100 researchers across the Oregon University System, housed at OSU’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences (formerly COAS). That may not sound like much. But for ecosystems and organisms that have adapted to distinct niches over countless millennia, it can be huge.

“Small changes in temperature correspond to enormous changes in the environment,” explains NASA on its climate change website. “For example, at the end of the last Ice Age, when the Northeast United States was covered by more than 3,000 feet of ice, average temperatures were only 5 to 9 degrees cooler than today.”

And temperatures will keep rising through the end of the century — faster if carbon emissions continue unabated, slower if significant cutbacks are made, the researchers say. As the thermometer climbs, summers will get hotter and drier, snowpack will shrink, wildfires will spark up, rising seas and coastal floods will speed erosion. Plant and animal populations will shift across the landscape as they struggle to adjust. Pathogens will find new niches. Novel diseases will emerge.
Regions and communities that take active measures to adapt will fare best, the IPCC counsels.

Hearts and Minds

The iconic image of global climate change is a polar bear poised on a shrinking scrap of ice. This symbol of Earth’s fragility and life’s vulnerability — a floe adrift in the ocean, disintegrating under great white paws — works because it embodies a maddening complexity in a single, searing picture. You can wrap your heart around it, as well as your mind. It helps, too, that the basic science is easy: Heat melts ice. You don’t need a physics degree to grasp cause and effect.

Unfortunately for the scientists and environmentalists sounding the alarm for climate change, clear-cut images are hard to find. That’s because threats to human survival suggested by long-term data and projected by computer models are as complex as the systems they attempt to characterize. Rarely can they be reduced to a picture as stark, or as haunting.

Neither can clarity be found in America’s popular media. Images with the power to persuade — say, villagers being inundated by seawater in low-lying places like Madagascar and the Maldives Islands — rarely make the evening news. And when catastrophes of nature are reported, coverage lurches from natural disaster to natural disaster, offering little insight into the forces that connect and drive them. Monstrous storms crush small towns in Hurricane Alley. Heat waves sizzle across the Rust Belt. Wildfires blacken homes in California and the Southwest. Drought bakes the ranches and rangelands of Texas. People who rely on cable or network news for their information may perceive such events as random and unrelated — as short-term weather dynamics rather than long-term climate indicators.

Early Adapters

In the Pacific Northwest — this temperate corner of the country where extremes of heat, cold, wind, flood and fire are uncommon — the signs of change are less evident than in some other regions. Oregon’s relatively benign climate presents a predicament for planners and policymakers, according to public health expert Kari Lyons-Eubanks.

“We’re not in Chicago, where people are dying from heat,” notes Lyons-Eubanks, a policy analyst for the Multnomah County Health Department. “We’re not in Florida, where people are suffering from dengue fever. When dengue is happening, people pay attention to the issue.

“In Oregon, we don’t have a destructive hazard that’s causing a big problem right now. With slow, creeping climate change, it’s a little bit more challenging.” But it also presents an opening — if communities have the foresight to walk through it.

“We’re lucky in the Pacific Northwest because we have more time to figure this out,” she says. “We have an opportunity to do this really well if we add some urgency to it. We can adapt if we pay attention now.”

All over Oregon, government agencies and private companies are doing just that. Using scientific data from OCCRI and elsewhere to craft policies and create plans to help people and ecosystems adapt to climatic shifts now and in the future.

“Prudent measures to adapt should be taken now,” Dello and Mote caution. “Resilience needs to be built into human communities and fostered in natural communities to deal with the adverse impacts of climate change.”

Click on the Terra Up Close sidebars on this page to read what stories from stakeholders in a range of economic and environmental sectors. You will meet a wheat farmer in Eastern Oregon, a public-health professional and a green-construction expert in Portland, a sustainability official in Salem, an ornithologist in Ashland, a city planner in Florence and a forest geneticist in Bend.

For Oregon BEST, Johanna Brickman brings university researchers and businesses together to develop new solutions to environmental problems. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum, OSU Extension and Experiment Station Communications)

PORTLAND, Oregon – Oysters and clams build their shells locally. Using only the most immediate minerals, chemicals and organic compounds to craft their shelters, the mulluscs are masters of waste-free, energy-efficient, life-sustaining construction.

A group of humans led in part by the Oregon University System has embarked on a similarly molluscan task: to construct a “living building” that taps directly into nature. Like a biological organism, the Oregon Sustainability Center in downtown Portland is designed to create energy from the sun, capture water from the sky and recycle outputs to the Earth. Workspaces will be alive with sensors giving continuous feedback to tenants on the fundamental questions driving the project: How are we protecting the planet? How can we do better?

“The built environment, as a form of both art and problem-solving, is a real, tangible expression of human connection to the Earth,” notes Johanna Brickman, an expert in sustainable architecture and a key participant in the endeavor. “It’s the shell that we build for ourselves.”

The center’s planned use of 100-percent local, eco-friendly materials is just the beginning. More broadly, its creators envision it as a crucible for innovation. A “triple-net-zero” building — one that emits no carbon, generates its own energy, and produces no waste — it could showcase the world’s most advanced technologies in green construction.

The center is the serendipitous brainchild of the Oregon State Board of Higher Education, the City of Portland, the Oregon Environmental Council and Earth Advantage Institute, all of which were heading down the same built-environment path in 2008 when they bumped into each other and decided to join forces. The university researchers, architects, engineers, urban planners, environmentalists and entrepreneurs leading the project anticipate its role as an internationally recognized seedbed for life-sustaining technologies when it opens, possibly as early as 2013. But with a price tag of $62 million, it has hit a stumbling block: strapped state and city budgets. Financial support for the project will remain uncertain, The Oregonian reported in December 2011, until the Legislature votes in February and the Portland City Council votes in the spring.

Synergies of Energy

Johanna Brickman is all about the synergies of design, construction and adaptation to a rapidly changing environment. When she arrived in Portland in the late ‘90s, her resume featured degrees in studio art and environmental studies, four years of organic farming, and a stint as an artist for a Southern California architect. It all coalesced in a new position created for her at one of Portland’s leading firms, Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects, to “inform their design from a sustainability perspective.” She began digging into alternative materials. “Organic farming taught me a lot about systems thinking — the interconnectedness of things,” she says. “In my work, I’m always looking at the intersection of culture and natural systems — anthropology, policy, biology — and how all of that merges with self-expression.”

With LEED certification just emerging as the “industry’s catapult” toward sustainability, Brickman grew her team at ZGF to eight before taking on her current challenge: speeding up commercialization of emerging technologies and spurring technical solutions to environmental problems by bringing university researchers and private businesses together. “If you push these two groups together as much as possible and force that interaction, you’d be surprised at what pops out,” says Brickman.

Brickman manages the Sustainable Built Environment Program for Oregon BEST (Built Environment & Sustainable Technologies Center), a legislatively created research center that drives innovation in green building and renewable energy by connecting businesses with more than 200 researchers from Oregon State, Portland State, University of Oregon and Oregon Institute of Technology. Nearly half are from OSU. Rick Spinrad, OSU’s vice president for research, sits on BEST’s board of directors.
“Of the folks who have been involved in our research team, OSU has been disproportionately represented,” Brickman says.

“They’ve had a lot of interest and a lot of engagement. In terms of doing applied research, it’s been really rewarding to work with the OSU folks.”

Extending Resources

Scott Shull is Intel’s liaison with Oregon BEST. “We’re looking at closing the loop with the office worker, with the individuals who are in the building,” says Shull, a director in Intel’s Eco-Technology program and a member of Oregon BEST’s university-industry research consortium. “Intel, having spent 30 years making computing personal said, ‘Well, we can lead the way in making energy personal, too.’”

The “concept vehicle” Intel has developed is a PC equipped with light- and climate-sensing devices. “We call it POEM — personal office energy manager,” says Shull. “It detects ambient conditions — What’s the light? What’s the temperature? What’s the humidity? We’ll be able to integrate all this information, report it to the user and coach them if they want to do better.”

Oregon’s preeminence in life-sustaining policies, especially in transportation and land-use planning, is unquestioned, Brickman says. “We’re a state that has long relied on its natural resources for its success. Along with that comes an awareness of the need to preserve, to extend, to care for those resources — and an understanding of how that’s tied to your own sustainability.”

John Alexander tracks shifting bird migration and reproductive patterns for the Klamath Bird Observatory in Ashland. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum, OSU Extension and Experiment Station Communications)

ASHLAND, Oregon – As he treads a footpath in the Bear Creek watershed, John Alexander is telling a story about the riparian zone’s recent restoration when he stops abruptly. “There’s a rail!” he whispers, pointing at a clump of cattails. His visitor whirls to see, but the bird has melted into the vegetation. “Just wait,” he says softly. “It’s coming out the other side!” Seconds later, the long-legged bird slips between the tall dry stalks and vanishes once again. “They’re not called ‘secretive marsh birds’ for nothing,” says Alexander, executive director of the Klamath Bird Observatory. “That’s where the expression, ‘skinny as a rail’ comes from. When you look at them head-on, you can hardly see them.”

The Virginia rail is one of the species Alexander and his fellow ornithologists monitor in the Klamath-Siskiyou bioregion, a biodiversity hot spot straddling the Oregon-California border. Spanning 10 million acres, the region is home to more than 400 resident and migratory avian species, 200 of which breed in the area. Some are abundant (song sparrows, Canada geese). Others are rare or threatened (rosy finches, marbled murrelets).

Whether common or scarce, each is an important indicator of ecosystem health. That’s why Alexander’s organization is committed to “all-bird” conservation, monitoring clusters or “suites” of species whose habitats mix or overlap. Scientists have discovered that a more accurate ecological picture emerges from monitoring suites of “focal species” rather than monitoring individual species.

“Instead of focusing on how one species responds to management, we take a community-composition approach,” explains Alexander, who collaborates with OSU forest ecologist Matt Betts on modeling projects. “If you put all your eggs in one basket, so to speak, you can miss a lot of confounding factors. By looking at five or six associates, you diversify your understanding of what’s happening on the landscape, whether it’s an oak woodland, an old-growth forest or a wetland.”

Heating Up

A birdcall pierces the wintry air. “Is it a hawk?” a visitor asks Alexander.

“It sounds like a red-tail,” he says. “Then again, Steller’s jays can mimic hawks to scare away competitors.” Looking up, he scans the leafless branches. “There it is!” he points. At that moment, a winged form rises effortlessly above the treetops and disappears into the cold blue sky. “Yep, it’s a red-tail.”

This rich riparian habitat at Bear Creek is both a data source for scientists and a living lab for kids. The Klamath Bird Observatory shares space with the Willow Wind Community Learning Center, an old farmhouse that the local school district now runs as an educational facility.

At the top of a narrow staircase plastered with wildlife posters, Alexander and his colleagues labor in a warren of shoebox-sized offices that belie the scope of their work. To the observatory’s vast collection of bird data, the mother of all variables is soon to be added: climate change. As a partner in a mega-study on North Pacific birds, the Klamath group is working with two other conservation groups — PRBO Conservation Science and the American Bird Observatory — to create computer models of species distribution under three climate scenarios: low, medium and high temperatures for the Northwest. Ecologist Sam Veloz of PRBO drew on OCCRI’s 2010 analysis in the lead-up to the study. “I used the Oregon Climate Assessment Report for background while preparing the grant proposal and for identifying data sets to use for our project,” says Veloz.

Landscapes are holistic. They flow across Earth’s surface, one into another, seamlessly. Boundaries of jurisdiction — county, state, nation — are human artifacts, irrelevant to the foraging, nesting and migrating of birds. Overcoming the artificial lines on the regional map is a main mission of the study’s sponsor, the North Pacific Landscape Conservation Cooperative (one of 22 regional public-private cooperatives in the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife). Hosted by the OSU-based Northwest Climate Science Center, the cooperative represents yet another break from tradition in environmental science and management.

By knocking down barriers between the usual silos — government agencies, NGOs, scientists, land managers, tribes, universities — conservation efforts can better address the urgent needs of species and ecosystems. “This partnership is helping to link science and management more tightly,” Alexander says.

What If?

The study’s endgame is a tool: an interactive, online program for land managers. It will help them better understand current conditions and also look into possible futures. Alexander calls them “what-if” scenarios.

“It will be a decision-support tool that ties our science directly to their challenges,” says Alexander, who has devoted his career to what he calls the science-management interface. “They will be able to click on any pixel on the regional map and find out the probability that a number of different bird species will be there. It will help them make more informed broad-scale decisions that will benefit birds and people.”

If current predictions are right, bird communities could shift dramatically as temperatures warm. Alexander warns of a potentially massive species re-shuffling that could upset the equilibrium of coexistence. The current project, he hopes, will help mitigate such challenges. “All-bird conservation is something that is going to benefit everybody. Birds are our tool for moving toward healthier landscapes,” says Alexander.