But climate? We look to patterns of wind, temperature and precipitation. You can’t use a compass to tell you if it’s going to rain, but scientists have known for many years that climate and the Earth’s magnetic field move in similar fashion. They don’t understand if they are related and, if so, why.

The JOIDES Resolution in port at Ponta Delgada, Azores. IODP Expedition 339, Mediterranean Outflow. (Photo: John Beck, IODP/TAMU)

Stranger yet is where Chuang Xuan, a postdoctoral scientist at Oregon State University, is looking for clues to solve this mystery: the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Xuan has joined an expedition on the research ship JOIDES Resolution to drill deep into the seafloor where the Mediterranean Sea flows into the Atlantic. It is there, he says, that thick sediments deposited by the Mediterranean’s outflow may have preserved variations in climate along with the magnetic history of the planet.

The expedition is part of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP), an international research program in which OSU scientists have played a leading role.

According to Xuan, the combination of high sediment accumulation rates and the type of sediment may yield excellent paleomagnetic records — good enough to record small geomagnetic changes that scientists call “excursions” — as well as high-quality paleoclimate data from the same sediment sequences. He plans to study correlations between the two types of records to see whether and how geomagnetic field variation and climate change might be connected.

Chuang Xuan (Paleomagnetist, Oregon State University) and Carl Richter (Paleomagnetist, University of Louisiana) discuss the results of their testing. Expedition 339, Mediterranean Outflow, of the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program. (Photo: John Beck, IODP/TAMU)

A member of OSU’s Paleo-and-Environmental Magnetism Laboratory in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences, Xuan studies the process that causes deep-sea sediments to be magnetized. By deciphering past variations in Earth’s magnetic field, he works to understand the causes and consequences of geomagnetic change. He uses magnetic records from Arctic sediments for paleoenvironmental and stratigraphic applications. He also develops software to process large volumes of paleomagnetic data on sediment cores.

Xuan received his Ph.D. in geology from the University of Florida in 2010. He earned his master’s in applied mathematics in 2005 from China University of Geosciences, Wuhan, where he also received his bachelor’s in geology in 2002.

See weekly trip reports, photos and other information about the expedition.

About IODP

The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) is an international research program dedicated to advancing scientific understanding of the Earth through drilling, coring, and monitoring the subseafloor. The JOIDES Resolution is a scientific research vessel managed by the U.S. Implementing Organization of IODP (USIO). Together, Texas A&M University, Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, and the Consortium for Ocean Leadership comprise the USIO.  IODP is supported by two lead agencies: the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology. Additional program support comes from the European Consortium for Ocean Research Drilling (ECORD), the Australian-New Zealand IODP Consortium (ANZIC), India’s Ministry of Earth Sciences, the People’s Republic of China (Ministry of Science and Technology), and the Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources.

In 2008, I participated in one of the few scientific expeditions aimed at characterizing the abundance of plastic debris and the associated impacts of plastic on microbial communities. That expedition was part of research funded by the National Science Foundation through C-MORE, the Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education.

Plastic “nurdles,” a pre-production material for manufacturing plants, are a common cargo in merchant vessels and a significant component of ocean pollution. OSU oceanographer Charles Miller recovered these plastic bits (about 3 millimeters across, less than half the size of a pencil eraser) from the North Pacific gyre in 1971. (Photo: David Reinert, COAS; photoillustration, Teresa Hall)

Standing on the bow of a research ship, floating in the heart of the alleged garbage patch, my colleagues and I looked out onto a calm, apparently pristine blue ocean. By towing a mesh net through these waters and deploying instruments capable of measuring particle size and abundance, it became clear that the sea around us actually contained few, very small pieces of plastic. If you were to line up 1,000 1-liter Nalgene™ bottles filled with ocean water from this location, one to five of them would contain a single piece of plastic roughly the size of a worn-down pencil eraser. In comparison, plankton (millions to billions of organisms per milliliter) outnumber and outweigh plastic by a considerable measure.

The amount of plastic out there isn’t inconsequential, but using the highest concentrations ever reported by scientists, the plastic debris floating in the surface waters of the North Pacific could be rounded up to produce a patch that is a small fraction of the state of Texas, not twice the size. This is not to say that the issue of plastic in the ocean should be dismissed; rather, the problem is more complex and enigmatic.

One of the longest records of ocean plastic comes from the western North Atlantic. Compiling a 22-year survey of plastic debris, researchers reported concentrations very similar to what we found in the Pacific, but there was a catch. The amount of plastic in the North Atlantic has not increased since the mid-1980s, despite a surge in plastic production over the same period. This unexpected conclusion has led to a lot of speculation: Are we doing a better job of preventing plastics from getting into the ocean? Is more plastic sinking out of the surface waters? Is plastic being more efficiently broken down? At present, we just don’t know.

New research findings may point to one part of the answer: microbes! Not only is plastic prime real estate for microbes, but they may actively degrade it. This interesting finding may partially explain the mystery of “missing plastic” in the Atlantic.

If there is a take-home message, it’s that plastic clearly does not belong in the ocean. The practical solution is to reduce the input of plastic into our oceans in the first place. There is no need to exaggerate the problem to Texas-sized proportions.

Photo: Alex Staroseltsev

Whether or not you’re a fan of gulping down raw oysters doused with Tabasco, recent declines in the succulent Northwest shellfish are cause for alarm. That’s because the chemical changes in seawater that are harming oysters could have far-reaching effects on other ocean species as well (see “Tipping Point”).

A few years ago in Tillamook, oyster larvae at the Whiskey Creek Shellfish Hatchery were mysteriously dying. OSU scientists diagnosed the problem: acidic seawater, which disrupts the formation of calcium carbonate, the hardening compound in shells and corals. Researchers helped the growers make adjustments in their operation to reduce the influx of acidic water.

Now, with support from the National Science Foundation, oceanographers George Waldbusser, Burke Hales and Brian Haley in OSU’s College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences and Chris Langdon of the Mulluscan Broodstock Program at Hatfield Marine Science Center are running experiments to find the threshold at which oysters, clams and mussels are harmed by acidification.

“Scientists know very little, to date, about specific modes of action triggered by acidification,” Waldbusser says.

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Researchers in the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans, PISCO, are conducting a second NSF-funded project with sea urchins and mussels from California to Oregon. See Tipping Point.

For a  2008 story on ocean acidification along the West Coast, see Acid Ocean.

For information about supporting research and teaching through faculty endowments, contact the Oregon State University Foundation, 1-800-354-7281 or visit CampaignforOSU.org.

This map of the Endurance Array off the Northwest coast shows mooring sites planned at water depths of 25, 80 and 500 meters in two lines — one off Newport, Oregon, and the other off Gray's Harbor, Washington. Gliders will provide additional cross-shelf sampling. (Map courtesy of the Ocean Observatories Initiative's implementing organizations)

For more than half a century, oceanographers have ventured out of Newport to measure, probe and monitor the Pacific Ocean off the central Oregon Coast. And since the 1950s, these seafaring researchers have recorded about 4,000 “profiles” of the near-shore waters — surface to bottom measurements of temperature, salinity and oxygen levels that begin to tell us how the world’s largest ocean influences everything from our weather to fisheries.

Then in 2005, Oregon State University scientists tested a prototype undersea glider that could be programmed to patrol beneath the ocean surface and collect many of the same measurements. At the time, the scientists predicted that these gliders could revolutionize the study of the world’s oceans.

Their vision is rapidly becoming a reality.

In the past five years, a fleet of gliders operated by OSU’s College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences has covered more than 43,000 kilometers, a distance that would more than circumnavigate the globe. Even more striking is the productivity of the sleek, torpedo-like machines. In those five years, the gliders have recorded more than 156,000 oceanic profiles, almost 40 times what six decades of shipboard studies have provided.

“That’s pretty amazing, when you think about it,” says Jack Barth, a professor of oceanography and one of OSU’s glider pioneers. “Each year alone, we log more profiles than have ever been recorded via ship off Newport. And the beauty of gliders is that the data is continual. They record 24 hours a day, regardless of the weather or how rough the sea is.”

Underwater vehicles are not new to research, but the autonomous gliders used by OSU differ from earlier versions because they lack tethers or propellers — meaning they don’t have to be accompanied by a ship. The gliders instead are driven by buoyancy changes, which lessen the overall energy consumption. By displacing seawater, the gliders increase their volume and become more buoyant. Or they can decrease their volume and become heavier, sinking lower in the water. Small wings on the gliders translate some of that vertical motion into forward motion.

The machines can be programmed to run for three to five weeks, from near-shore to the continental slope, and every six hours they rise to the surface and transmit data to OSU computers via satellite. The data they collect informs scientists on conditions including El Niño and La Niña, hypoxia (low oxygen) and resulting “dead zones” and harmful algal blooms.

Expanding the Fleet

Barth and fellow OSU oceanographer Kipp Shearman, together with their team of faculty research assistants and graduate students, operate a fleet of nine gliders. Six are Slocum gliders, manufactured by Teledyne Webb Research of Falmouth, Massachusetts, and based on the original prototype tested in 2005. Three are new Seagliders developed at the University of Washington. The Slocums can go as deep as 200 meters below the surface; the newer Seagliders can explore the ocean down to 1,000 meters and stay out for months.

Each glider costs between $100,000 and $200,000, so the OSU fleet is an impressive resource that is about to get much better.

Three years ago, OSU was selected as one of the lead institutions for the $387 million Ocean Observatories Initiative, a National Science Foundation-funded project to study the world’s oceans and their relationship to climate variability. One component of that project is to create a coastal observatory off the Northwest coast that will use moorings, buoys and gliders to better observe and monitor the ocean.

While engineers are still designing the hardware and instrumentation for the moorings, OSU in 2012 will deploy six new gliders — plus an additional half-dozen gliders on shore to be rotated into the observation array — bringing the total fleet to 21. And the new gliders will include instrumentation that has piqued the interest of ecologists, the fishing industry and others.

“In addition to the core instrumentation, these new gliders will be able to use acoustics to measure water velocity,” Barth adds. “For the first time, we will be able to nearly simultaneously map ocean currents – from the surface to the bottom of the ocean – and detect just where these underwater ‘rivers’ run.”

Public Access to Data

Data from the Ocean Observatories Initiative will be available as they are being collected and shared with researchers and the public alike.

“The fishermen we’ve talked to are intensely interested in the data we will generate,” he says. “Crabbers don’t want to put their pots into areas that have strong bottom currents, nor do trawlers want to contend with strong drifts. The findings will also be important for ecologists studying larval dispersal of marine animals.”

Technology is advancing so rapidly, Barth says, that the gliders will carry new instruments as early as the next year or two. “We’re putting hydrophones onto the moorings, for example, and there’s no reason why we can’t put them onto the gliders and listen for marine mammals or fish that have been tagged with transmitters.”

OSU’s fleet of 21 gliders will enable Barth, Shearman, scientific colleagues and the public to continually monitor five east-west transects — off the northwest tip of Washington, Gray’s Harbor, Cape Mears, Newport, and Coos Bay — while rotating the machines for calibration, maintenance and battery charging. The newest gliders will allow them to run a north-south pattern about 150 kilometers off the coast and, with separate NOAA funding, begin a new east-west transect off Crescent City, California.

“We’ve been doing the Newport sector for five years now,” Barth says, “and we’ve seen things we’ve never seen before, from the influence of coastal rivers, to details about hypoxia. It’s become one of the most well-studied ocean regions on Earth. Now we’ll be able to get similar coverage up and down the coast, from the California border to Vancouver Island.

“It will be,” he added, “revolutionary.”

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See a March 23, 2011 story about deployment of new Ocean Observatories Initiative buoys off Newport, Ore. and Grays Harbor, Wash.

For information about supporting research and teaching through faculty endowments, contact the Oregon State University Foundation, 1-800-354-7281 or visit CampaignforOSU.org.

Click on the orange text below to see the animations.

Top view: Top view of data from a multibeam sonar observations of dolphin foraging. This animation is a composite of three observations overlapping in foraging stage to permit a visualization of a complete foraging bout. Each frame is the composite of six successive sonar echoes, providing higher resolution and three-dimensional information while minimizing noise in the data. The strong air cavity echo from each dolphin is represented by the dots. Isosurfaces of prey scattering strength identified from spatial statistics are shown in purple with lighter colors representing higher scattering. The travel of the vessel has been removed and the data is shown at 8 times real time.

Side view: Side view of data from a multibeam sonar observation of a foraging dolphins. This animation is a composite of three observations overlapping in foraging stage to permit a visualization of a complete foraging bout. Each frame is the composite of six successive sonar echoes, providing higher resolution and three-dimensional information while minimizing noise in the data. The strong air cavity echo from each dolphin is represented by the dots. Blue dots show dolphins behind the center of the circle and yellow represent dolphins in front of this plane. Isosurfaces of prey scattering strength identified from spatial statistics are shown in purple with lighter colors representing higher scattering. The travel of the vessel has been removed and the data is shown at 8 times real time.

3-d view: Dolphin positions recorded from a multibeam sonar observation of a foraging dolphin group. This animation is a composite of three observations overlapping in foraging stage to permit a visualization of a complete foraging bout. Each frame is the composite of six successive sonar echoes, providing higher resolution and three- dimensional information while minimizing noise in the data. The strong air cavity echo from each dolphin is represented by the dots. The travel of the vessel has been removed and the data is shown at 8 times real time.

Kelly Benoit-Bird (Photo: Craig Mitchelldyer, Getty Images for the McArthur Foundation)

Kelly Benoit-Bird studies ocean organisms smaller than a microchip and bigger than a luxury motor home — the tiniest crustaceans to the mightiest cetaceans. In effect, she studies just about anything that swims or drifts in the sea: copepods and krill, diatoms and dinoflagellates, siphonophores and salps, spinner dolphins and Humboldt squid, Pacific sardines and sperm whales. Not only is she unbounded by species classifications, she also is unrestrained by the dimensions of time and space. What drives her research is, indeed, the traversing of those very dimensions by animals and plants in search of survival.

As a pelagic (open-ocean) ecologist, Benoit-Bird investigates the intricate interactions among predators and prey that take place day and night, full moon to new moon, summer to winter, El Niño to La Niña in Earth’s vast oceans.

“Despite the apparent variety of the ongoing research projects in my lab, all of our research aims to understand the role of spatial and temporal patterns in ecological processes on spatial scales ranging from sub-meter to hundreds of kilometers, at temporal scales of minutes to years, and over a range of animal size from zooplankton to great whales,” Benoit-Bird explains on her webpage for Oregon State University’s College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences.

The challenge is almost beyond imagining. Within the world’s 326 million cubic miles of seawater, most species interactions happen where humans cannot witness them. Besides, as Benoit-Bird points out, the marine environment is in constant motion. On land, plants hold fast to the ground. Forests may be complex ecosystems to study, but at least they stay put. At sea, plants drift on tides and currents, rising and falling in the water column with the sun and the moon and the seasons.

“In the ocean, plants are incredibly small, have very little structure and move all over the place — sometimes even actively,” the researcher says. “Some of the plants can swim.”

To compensate, Benoit-Bird extends her senses. She devises novel acoustic and optical technologies that collect data remotely, giving scientists a virtual front-row seat on some of nature’s most mysterious processes. Her innovations are opening the world’s oceans to human understanding in ways never before possible. In 2010, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation recognized her pioneering work with a prestigious $500,000 MacArthur Fellowship — popularly known as a “Genius Award.”

Life in Layers

Instead of being like a big pot of soup with its ingredients evenly mixed, the ocean is more like a big blue torte with dense congregations of organisms layered vertically, Benoit-Bird and other oceanographers have learned in recent years. In coastal waters across the planet, scientists have discovered that plankton, both in its plant and animal forms, coalesce into layers two or three feet thick, sometimes extending for miles horizontally. These “thin layers” of tiny life forms — which Benoit-Bird calls “great smorgasbords of food”
— likely hold critical clues to how ocean ecosystems work.

“While thin layers are just beginning to be investigated,” Benoit- Bird writes in a recent issue of Continental Shelf Research, “thin layers are likely to be important for a variety of biological processes, including growth rates, reproductive success, grazing, predator-prey encounters, nutrient uptake and cycling rates, as well as toxin production.”

To get inside those mysteries from the deck of a research vessel, Benoit- Bird has been developing a whole new generation of tools. She uses sonar technologies to collect acoustical data that are then fed into computers for analysis. To broaden their options, she and her collaborators have experimented with linking disparate gear types, such as video cameras and echosounders (devices that locate layers and schools of organisms by sending out pulses of sound waves). They’ve designed new uses for old standbys, like retrofitting a remotely operated vehicle (“a little tethered robot”) to find and track plankton layers by following water density. They’ve invented a new kind of sonar to study the distribution of individual zooplankton inside thin layers.

Her ambitious research goals, supported by the National Science Foundation and other agencies, necessarily push her toward more expansive technologies.

“My perspective is that we shouldn’t be limited by the tools we have,” she says. “I like to think about the question first and figure out how to address it later. It may mean we have to develop a new tool or a new way of analyzing data or a new way of deploying instruments to get at the questions we’re interested in.”

A “Spatial Ballet”

Computer animations created from recent acoustical studies show fish diving through plankton layers, gobbling holes in the tightly packed, food-rich patches. Another animation shows spinner dolphins swimming in tight formation to corral layers of lanternfish during coopera- tive feeding.

“The emerging picture is one of an incalculably complex, finely tuned, and delicate interaction between predators and prey, chemistry and light, currents and water column, night and day,” writes author Julia Whitty in a recent Mother Jones article featuring Benoit-Bird. “Some semblance of this spatial ballet, played in weightless three-dimensional darkness, has likely been part of the oceans since the oceans were brought to life: layers of life gathering in extremely high densities to feed or to avoid being eaten.”

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For information about supporting research and teaching through faculty endowments, contact the Oregon State University Foundation, 1-800-354-7281 or visit CampaignforOSU.org.

Federal agencies are funding OSU research on tsunamis, marine ecosystems, wave energy, ocean observing, invasive species and acidification, among other things. In September 2008, the U.S. Department of Energy created a Northwest National Marine Renewable Energy Center at OSU’s Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport, further cementing the university’s leadership in wave energy and bringing to $13 million the total amount of funding for the initiative. Researchers are looking at environmental (how will marine organisms respond to subsurface electrical fields?) and technical (what engineered systems will be most effective?) questions and collaborating with state agencies, communities and the private sector.

National Leadership

In 2009, OSU zoology professor Jane Lubchenco became administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — the second OSU faculty member to hold that position after John Byrne in the 1980s, who later became president of OSU. In addition, Kelly Falkner, former professor in the College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences (COAS), now leads the National Science Foundation’s polar research programs. Her COAS colleagues have made similar contributions: Professor Mike Freilich heads NASA’s Earth Science Division; Mark Abbott, dean of the college, is a member of the National Science Board, which oversees the NSF and advises Congress and the president; and Emeritus Professor Tim Cowles directs the national Ocean Observatories Initiative. (See “Run Silent, Run Deep” on Terra)

In August 2009, NOAA announced that it would move its Pacific Fleet operations from Seattle to Newport to be adjacent to OSU’s Hatfield Center, a stunning economic boon for the mid-Oregon coast that will bring as many as 175 NOAA employees, a half-dozen ships and an annual economic impact in the tens of millions.
Ocean Observing

Shortly after that, NSF announced that OSU would be one of the lead institutions on a $386.4 million Ocean Observatories Initiative that, among other things, will establish a system of surface moorings, seafloor platforms and undersea gliders to monitor the ocean — with a major presence off Newport.

“Oregon State University has perhaps more breadth and depth in marine and coastal science than anyone, and that opens up a lot of doors,” says Abbott. “In addition to expertise in many different disciplines, we provide fundamental science, research with direct application, and now we’re providing new access to the ocean through ships, satellites, the Ocean Observatories Initiative, gliders, the Marine Mammal Institute and other programs — and we do it on a global scale.”

“Sea Cow College”

OSU’s emergence as a force in marine and ocean sciences has been in the works for decades. The university came of age as an agricultural institution, developed the top-ranked forestry program in the country, and toward the end of the last century, became an emerging force in engineering. Marine sciences got some recognition, such as when OSU oceanographers discovered the first documented undersea hydrothermal vents and when John Byrne was named NOAA administrator.

But no one ever accused OSU of being a sea cow college. “We’ve always been the light under the bushel basket,” says Abbott. “Face it, fundamental science isn’t necessarily sexy. But more and more people are beginning to notice Oregon State because of the volume of high-quality research, our federal leadership, the emergence of programs with applications to real-world problems and that confluence of recent major events.”

Oceanography began at OSU in the late 1950s under the leadership of Wayne Burt, but its reach was limited by poor facilities and little access to the ocean. The 16-foot fiberglass boat Burt used in those early days was restricted to Yaquina Bay, and it wasn’t until the Office of Naval Research provided a sea-going 80-foot research vessel called the Acona in 1961 that the university was able to attract new ocean scientists, says Byrne.

The R/V Yaquina followed in 1964, and a year later, OSU opened the Hatfield Marine Science Center as a research, education and outreach facility. As both HMSC and COAS grew, the university developed marine science strengths in other areas — marine ecology, fisheries and wildlife, the nationally recognized Oregon Sea Grant program, wave energy, tsunamis and others.

The growth has been nothing short of phenomenal. In 2008-09, Oregon State University spent nearly $100 million on ocean and coastal research — 37 percent of all OSU research expenditures. And a funny thing happened along the way. Fundamental science has become — if not sexy — at least necessary in the eyes of the public. When the oil tanker New Carissa sank near Coos Bay in 1999, OSU physical oceanographers explained where the currents would carry the spilled oil. When the Pacific Ocean off Oregon was first plagued by low-oxygen areas that led to periodic marine “dead zones” in 2001-02, an interdisciplinary team of OSU researchers described the phenomenon and explained its origins.

The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami that killed more than 200,000 people drew comparisons with Oregon’s own Cascadia Subduction Zone and brought the university’s researchers into the spotlight. OSU’s O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory includes one of the world’s foremost tsunami wave basins.

In 2010, as British Petroleum’s Deepwater Horizon well continued to spew oil into the Gulf of Mexico, OSU researchers were documenting the effects. Kim Anderson of OSU’s Superfund Research Program established a sensor network to monitor PAHs (petroleum-based compounds) in the air and water. Bruce Mate, director of OSU’s Marine Mammal Institute, led efforts to monitor sperm whale movements. Stephen Brandt, director of Oregon Sea Grant, conducted his sixth assessment of fish habitat in the northern Gulf “dead zone.”

The strength of OSU’s expertise gained additional recognition this year when COAS scientist Kelly Benoit-Bird received a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, which carried a $500,000 grant for her research. She specializes in the use of acoustics to study marine ecology. (See “Genius of the Sea”)

Today, Oregon Sea Grant Director Stephen Brandt leads OSU’s Marine Council, which aims to enhance and to coordinate a global research enterprise. With scientists conducting studies from the Arctic to the Antarctic, from the North Atlantic to the South Pacific, Oregon State’s leadership in international ocean science is literal.

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An earlier version of this story, “Powered by Oceans,” appeared in the Winter 2010 issue of the Oregon Stater magazine.

For information about supporting research and teaching through faculty endowments, contact the Oregon State University Foundation, 1-800-354-7281 or visit CampaignforOSU.org.

Research expeditions regularly reveal unidentified organisms, adding knowledge about microbial ocean ecosystems (Photo: Angelicque White)

The color of the ocean can range from steel gray to green or sky blue, but during a research cruise off the coast of Chile on board the R/V (research vessel) Melville in December, Angelicque White saw something unusual. “We were sitting on the bow of the boat watching the whales go by. One whale, two whales, 10 whales — it was amazing,” she says in a video from the ship. “And suddenly we realized we were in this red sea. You can see these strands, these filaments of bright, bright red. It’s gorgeous.”

Scientists ran up on the deck to lower fine-mesh nets into the water, hoping to catch a few of the organisms responsible for this colorful display, but their efforts were in vain. Their tiny quarry slipped right through the nets. Finally, using that most sophisticated of oceanographic instruments, the plastic bucket, they brought up a water sample and put a drop under a microscope. According to White, what they saw was as puzzling as it was exciting. “We saw these tiny . . . maybe dinoflagellates (plankton associated with ‘red tides’). They’re motile; they’ve got flagella. And these things are just zooming around,” says White. Other experts suspected the organisms were ciliates, which are common in the Pacific Ocean plume from the Columbia River (positive identification — and a $20 scientific bet — will be settled by genomic analysis). Their difficulty in identifying the organisms is testimony to the huge microbial diversity of the oceans.

It was another day at sea for Oregon State University oceanographers Ricardo Letelier, Joe Jennings Jr. and White. They had joined colleagues from Chile, Spain, Woods Hole, MIT, UC-Santa Cruz and the University of Hawai’i at Manoa on a 2,300-mile research expedition from the rich fishing grounds off Chile to one of the world’s least productive seas, located around Easter Island. Their purpose: to understand how microbial diversity changes from areas of high to low productivity. As scientists in OSU’s College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences and members of C-MORE — the Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education — they are studying the under-appreciated but most abundant life forms on the planet. C-MORE is one of 17 Science and Technology Centers funded by the National Science Foundation.

Every Breath We Take

To appreciate their mission, it helps to know a little about ocean microbes. They help to control the chemistry of the atmosphere by producing and recycling carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. And those that conduct photosynthesis — the phytoplankton — supply much of the oxygen we breathe. In fact, some scientists suggest that we can thank one of the smallest and most abundant of them, Prochlorococcus, for every fifth breath we take.

“These organisms are oxygenating the planet. They’re the base of the food web. Yet we know very little about how shifts in microbial diversity and productivity impact ecosystem function,” says White.

Better understanding won’t come too soon. Last summer, a report in the journal Nature by a Dalhousie University research team in Nova Scotia concluded that phytoplankton have been declining in the world’s open oceans at the rate of about 1 percent per year for the last century. While that study has generated debate in the scientific community, future declines are likely as the oceans warm. That’s because as temperatures increase, the seas will separate more strongly into nutrient depleted surface and nutrient rich deep-ocean layers, reducing the nutrient upwelling that fertilizes plankton at the sunlit ocean surface.

Letelier agrees that warmer oceans will likely mean lower plankton productivity globally. However, he adds, it’s not that simple. In some areas, production is increasing. For example, through nearly 20 years of intensive study at a research site known as Station ALOHA north of Hawaii, he and other researchers have found that plankton production has increased as the sea has become warmer and more acidic.

Nitrogen for Lunch

The reason for this apparent contradiction may lie in nitrogen, a critical nutrient for plankton growth and one that is in low supply in large areas of the oceans. Most plankton depend on nitrate (a molecule composed of nitrogen and oxygen) for their nitrogen supply. Experi- ments by Letelier, White and others have demonstrated that phytoplankton that use nitrogen gas diffused into the ocean from the air instead of nitrate can multiply even as other nutrients are in decline. On top of that, as more carbon dioxide enters the water from the air, these “nitrogen-fixing” microbes may grow faster until some other key nutrient becomes limiting.

It’s also important to remember, says White, that ocean microbes have the ability to respond to changing ocean conditions. “The variability that organisms display in their expression of genes over the course of a day is huge. And scaling that capacity for adaptation up to the next 10 years, when the oceans may be more stratified, warmer, more carbon-rich, in order to try to project what microbes might do in that kind of system, is difficult.”

The OSU researchers have developed new optical methods for monitoring plankton growth and abundance. And during cruises to Station ALOHA and in the South Pacific, they run shipboard experiments to see how microbial communities will respond to water that is warmer, more acidic or supplied with different forms and amounts of nutrients such as iron and phosphorus.

Depth Charge

They are also pioneering new ways of conducting experiments. In one 2008 study at Station ALOHA, they used the motion of ocean waves to pump water from 300 meters deep in the ocean to the surface. They wanted to see if a disturbance to the microbial ecosystem — in this case a sudden shot of nutrients from below — would stimulate plankton production.

Unfortunately, the study ended prematurely. The pumps broke from the stress of ocean waves before the researchers could see an impact. “We know a lot about how upwelling works and the physics of the ocean,” Letelier said after the study ended, “but there also are things we don’t know, which is why this study is so important. In this open ocean area near Hawaii, for example, phytoplankton blooms occur in the summer when there are almost no nutrients at the surface and the winds generally are calm. What triggers the blooms and where are the nutrients coming from? We need to know.” Lead researcher David M. Karl of the University of Hawaii is planning to repeat the effort, which was funded by the NSF and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

“It’s about understanding the base of the food web that covers 70 percent of the planet,” says White.

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See videos from the South Pacific expedition organized by the Center for Microbial Oceanography: Research and Education.

See stunning photos of plankton taken by Angelicque White and her colleagues.

For information about supporting research and teaching through faculty endowments, contact the Oregon State University Foundation, 1-800-354-7281 or visit CampaignforOSU.org.

Simulated tsunamis crash into scale model buildings at OSU's O.H. Hinsdale Wave Research Lab, the nation's largest tsunami test facility. Engineers have run tests with the Oregon coastal communities of Seaside and Cannon Beach (Photo: Frank Miller)

It may come like it did the last time, in the middle of a cold and blustery January night. Suddenly the ground will begin to shake, windows will shatter, bridges collapse, the electricity will go out and parents will frantically try to find a flashlight and dig sleepy kids out of bed, ignore everything else and run – because they know they only have minutes before the water arrives.

Even worse, it may come on a warm and breezy summer afternoon in July, when tens of thousands of visitors fly kites, build sand castles and play fetch with their dogs on one of the most beautiful stretches of coastline in the world. The rumble and shaking on the crowded beaches will quickly be replaced by a receding shoreline as the water eerily slides away, and people will start to run, anywhere they can, to get to higher ground – because they know the water will soon be coming back.

It will be scary, it will be destructive, and it’s going to happen, reasonably soon. People will talk for generations to come about the great subduction zone earthquake and tsunami of ____. Fill in the blank with a date; science can provide some guidance, but no one knows for certain when it will be.

Pat Corcoran, a coastal hazards outreach specialist with Oregon Sea Grant, is mindful of these risks and calls the disaster that’s waiting to happen “arguably the greatest recurring natural hazard in the lowest 48 states.” That’s about right. Subduction zones – like the Cascadia Subduction Zone that lurks just off the coast of the Pacific Northwest – produce the most massive earthquakes in the world. And their “up and down” ground motion triggers tsunamis, one of the most deadly ocean wave events in the world.

Like Clockwork

The problem is, at least in the United States, these events don’t happen very often. In fact, until the mid-1980s, scientists didn’t think great earthquakes and tsunamis were caused by Pacific Northwest fault zones. Then some pioneering research by the U.S. Geological Survey, Oregon State University and others began to unravel some ancient mysteries. Scientists found that not only do they happen here, they occur pretty regularly, about every 300 to 500 years on one part or all of the Cascadia Subduction Zone, which runs 700 miles from Cape Mendocino in California to Vancouver Island in Canada. The last event was pinpointed because the enormous tsunami it created raced all the way across the Pacific Ocean to Japan, where written records were kept. It occurred here about 9 p.m. on Jan. 26, 1700.

“The Native Americans at the time of the last subduction zone earthquake in 1700 had a rich oral history surrounding earthquakes and tsunamis,” Corcoran says. “One tradition encouraged people to weave long ropes. That way, the saying went, following the earthquake a person could tie one end of the long rope around a tree and the other onto their canoe in order to ride out the tsunami waves.”

It’s now 2010, more than three centuries later. The newest studies produced by Chris Goldfinger, an OSU marine geologist and one of the world’s leading experts on the Cascadia Subduction Zone, indicate that there’s a 37 percent chance of a partial rupture of the zone within the next 50 years, an event that could be similar in magnitude to the earthquake just experienced in Chile.

“Perhaps more striking than the probability numbers is that we have already gone longer without an earthquake than 75 percent of the known times between earthquakes in the last 10,000 years,” Goldfinger says. “And 50 years from now, that number will rise to 85 percent.”

So it’s coming soon, possibly tomorrow. Possibly in 10 years. A better than one in three chance within the next 50 years. But no one knows for sure, and that isn’t going to change. With existing science, earthquakes cannot be predicted with precision; we can only prepare.

But Are We Prepared?

A few years ago, local residents in Cannon Beach, Oregon, were pondering that question, as they followed the developing science on subduction zone earthquakes and worked with officials from the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries on evacuation maps for the anticipated tsunami.

Preparation for a tsunami, in this context, would be defined as people knowing what to do, where to go, getting to high ground and having the time to do it. Jay Raskin, a longtime resident, community leader and local architect, didn’t like what he was hearing.

“Around then, the scientists were describing and updating the potential risks for an earthquake and tsunami caused by the Cascadia Subduction Zone,” Raskin says. “We talked about the distances we needed to go, how high the water might get, where high enough ground was, the bridges that probably would be destroyed.

“And then we’re thinking, oh darn, this strategy of getting to high ground might not work for everyone,” he says. “For some people there just might not be enough time. We needed another option.”

Then Hurricane Katrina struck, and another lesson was offered to the Cannon Beach residents. In the aftermath of the storm, not only had the devastation of coastal communities been enormous, but there was no functioning city government, no working facility to help rebuild.

A Sunny Day at the Beach

Cannon Beach is a small coastal community a little south of Seaside, Oregon. It’s butted up against coastal headlands and stretches for several lovely miles along the Pacific Ocean coast. Most of its 1,700 residents live within a few blocks of the beach, and about half of them, and 75 percent of the businesses, reside within a tsunami inundation zone. But it could be much worse. On a peak summer day, up to 12,000 people may crowd the beaches around Cannon Beach. The city presents a microcosm of an issue that affects a vulnerable shoreline about 900 miles long.

Tsunami Evacuation Building

In addition to a tsunami response plan, the city needed a new city hall. So Raskin and others had an idea. Why not build a structure that could survive a tsunami, stand above the incoming water, give local residents and visitors a safe place they could run to on short notice, save many lives, and also serve as a base of operations after the disaster to help the city recover and get back up and running?

It was the comparatively new concept of “vertical evacuation” to escape a tsunami, and it was a good idea. Two problems: No structure of that type had ever been built in the United States, and in the few places in the world where such structures had been built, such as Japan, none had yet experienced a tsunami. So as an engineering challenge, this was literally uncharted water. Also, it would cost more. A design has now been created for a new 10,000-square-foot structure, and it’s estimated to cost around $4 million, about double the cost for a more conventional building.

But the issues are real, and the Cannon Beach residents knew it. They had watched the devastation from the Sumatra earthquake and tsunami in 2004, where 230,000 people died, most of them not from the earthquake, but rather the tsunami. The geology of that region is nearly identical to the Cascadia Subduction Zone.

“After the Sumatra earthquake, I saw on television this scientist from Thailand, who had tried years before to convince local authorities to put in warning buoys, but no one did anything,” Raskin says. “He was in tears, he considered it a personal failure.”

“That struck me hard,” he says. “I was a city councilor at the time, I knew we faced the same issues, and I didn’t want that to happen here, to have to say years later that we knew all about this but didn’t do anything.”

For a nearby subduction zone earthquake like the one expected on Cascadia, warning buoys are not really the point. The earthquake itself will give any informed person all the warning they need, and only minutes will be available to get to high ground before the water starts rising and just keeps coming – an event Raskin likens to “a sneaker wave on steroids.”

The Real Enemies: Time and Transportation

So last May, at the Hinsdale Wave Research Laboratory at OSU, a small model of the proposed new city hall building at Cannon Beach was being hit by simulated tsunamis repeatedly, to help address some of the questions. It’s not fancy, essentially a square structure on stilts, but very strong and with a sturdy foundation. But how strong is strong enough? What will be the effect of debris, such as floating cars, slamming into the pillars? OSU was helping Cannon Beach to answer those questions, in research supported by the National Science Foundation.

“We have to know just how strong this building has to be, so the community can build something that will work, but at the same time keep costs as low as possible,” says Dan Cox, an OSU professor of coastal and ocean engineering. “Some buildings may slow the force of the waves before they hit, for instance, and other debris may cause additional impacts.

“In engineering, this is new territory. We’re just scratching the surface of everything we need to know, but these studies should give us a higher degree of confidence in what we build, and in the process our students are learning how to build structures of this type for the future.”

Other work to aid Cannon Beach is also under way at OSU. Harry Yeh, the Edwards Professor of Coastal and Ocean Engineering, one of the world’s leading experts on tsunamis, has been involved with the community for years to help it address concerns, design the new structure. He is now working on an evacuation plan.

“We know we can build a structure that will survive an earthquake and tsunami, and could serve as an emergency shelter,” Yeh says. “Strong, reinforced concrete buildings can stand up to that, we saw that in Indonesia in 2004. And pretty much everyone agrees this structure would be good to have. But it will cost more, so to make this feasible, we have to figure out the best way to balance cost and function.”

The initiative in Cannon Beach is unique, and if implemented, will be the nation’s first structure designed specifically to survive an earthquake, resist the forces of a tsunami, and hopefully save lives. OSU has worked closely with state and federal agencies, as well as private companies, to make this happen. The result could form a model, both physically and inspirationally, for many other coastal communities that face similar concerns. And community support so far, Raskin says, has been reasonably strong. People have raised some fair and intelligent questions, but almost no one is advocating the status quo. Funding support may ultimately be sought from both local, state and federal levels and the private sector.

But Cannon Beach is one small town, on one short section of beach. The earthquake on the Cascadia Subduction Zone, when it happens, could be one of the great geologic events in world history, affecting three states, some of British Columbia, major cities and many millions of people. That’s a big problem, which goes well beyond the issue of the expected tsunami.

Living in the Quake Zone

Are we prepared?

OSU researchers are doing what they can. Earthquake and tsunami simulation modeling is being done in several Oregon sites. A course has been created and is being taught on “living with earthquakes.” OSU researchers have worked with the Oregon Department of Transportation to simulate tsunami loads on coastal bridges. Scientists have gone to Sumatra, to American Samoa, to Chile, to the sites of all the recent major subduction zone earthquakes and tsunamis in recent years to learn whatever might help.

To further explore these questions, Scott Ashford and Solomon Yim from OSU were part of a group supported by the National Science Foundation who went to Chile this past spring after the February 8.8 magnitude earthquake — also on a subduction zone similar to that of the Pacific Northwest. Yim, a professor of civil engineering, led a team of tsunami, structural and geotechnical engineers and surveyed damages to ports, coastal buildings and bridges. Ashford, professor and head of the School of Civil and Construction Engineering at OSU, said the group wanted to learn as much as possible about what had happened, what worked and what didn’t.

Chile, even more than the United States, has experience with subduction zone earthquakes. They happen with more frequency there, and a massive 9.5 event in 1960 was the largest earthquake ever recorded. Because of that, they have modern and aggressive building codes, as good or better than those in the Pacific Northwest, and much better than those used when many of the urban structures in Oregon and Washington were built 30 or more years ago.

“Part of what was striking about the Chile earthquake was the geographic extent of the damage. It was spread out over an area essentially from Seattle to Medford here in the U.S., and from I-5 to the coast,” Ashford says. “The damage itself, as you often see with earthquakes, was variable. Some areas were very hard hit, others much less.”

Chile, Japan and New Zealand – like the U.S., all situated on the notorious “ring of fire” around the Pacific Ocean – have some of the best seismic design standards in the world, Ashford adds. Engineers in Chile were able to observe certain types of architecture, often square, unimaginative buildings, that tended to resist damage much better than more innovative and irregular designs. But it still wasn’t good enough.

“In Concepcion, all the bridges from the south were collapsed or out of commission; people were cut off,” Ashford says. “You would see people living in tents, staring at the building they used to live in but afraid to enter it even for a few minutes to get their belongings, fearing it would collapse. And of course in the areas hit by the tsunami, the damage was just devastating; it was really heartbreaking.”

Engineer for Resilience

Oregon and Washington, Ashford says, face even greater devastation in the future. “We’re going to get hit worse than Chile did; I suspect much worse. We have many large buildings in our cities that were built in the 50s, 60s and 70s that will not do well in the earthquake.”

A prime lesson Ashford says he took away from the recent Chilean experience is to preserve the lifelines: electricity, gas, water, communication and transportation, as well as critical facilities like hospitals, fire stations and schools.

“What we need here is resiliency, to provide the infrastructure for rescue, relief, and recovery efforts that will enable Oregon to bounce back from such a disaster,” Ashford says. “Like the proposed city hall at Cannon Beach, that will save lives and give you something to build around.”

Ashford sees OSU as the logical institution to lead that effort. Working with the Oregon Department of Transportation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, utility companies, cities, and other agencies, OSU has the engineering and scientific and management expertise to help coordinate preparation for a major disaster, to build in that resilience that can literally mean the difference between life and death after a major disaster.

Fortunately, there may still be time to accomplish a great deal. Oregon Sea Grant’s Pat Corcoran noted that “we are the first modern generation to intellectually understand that we will experience great earthquakes and tsunamis.” The next event could happen tomorrow, but it also might not be for 30, 50 or 100 years. If so, that could offer a pretty good window of opportunity for public education and outreach for both local residents and tourists, community preparations, new and better building designs, sustained research programs, replacement of aging and dangerous structures. All of that is possible and many of these issues can be addressed if everyone involved — government, universities, agencies, people — work together to create a safer future.

But there’s a lot to do and only a limited time available to do it. Because a massive earthquake is coming that will destroy homes, buildings, roads, bridges and infrastructure across the Pacific Northwest. And a massive tsunami is coming with waters that will sweep ashore with deadly force. They are coming. We know that.

Are we prepared?

No.
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See a, April 2012 video about tsunami preparedness by Tom Bearden, National Public Radio.

Watch Risky Business in the Northwest on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

For information about supporting research and teaching through faculty endowments, contact the Oregon State University Foundation, 1-800-354-7281 or visit CampaignforOSU.org.

In his research on marine reserves, a graduate student taps his experience with both fish and humans.

Redfish Rocks is home to a diverse collection of marine species — and to a unique collaboration among fishermen, university scientists and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife. The jagged reef off the shores of Port Orford, one of two pilot sites in Oregon’s developing marine reserve network, was established by coastal residents who wanted to “have a local say and carve out benefits” for their community. Those are the words of the Port Orford Ocean Resource Team, a grassroots nonprofit launched in 2008 to protect local fish stocks — particularly BOFFFFs (Big Old Fat Fertile Female Fish) — and to engage in scientific research.

That’s where Tom Calvanese comes in. The OSU Marine Resource Management graduate student has studied fish in the Hawaiian and San Juan Islands and California’s Channel Islands, but he also has a decade of experience in some of the grittiest territory in community organizing: mobilizing services for the homeless and for indigent HIV/AIDS patients.

The study of rockfish movements at Redfish Rocks that he is designing with his adviserScott Heppell, assistant professor in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, will not only draw upon his undergraduate research at the universities of Hawaii, Washington and San Francisco State, but will also employ his skills working with disparate actors from multiple disciplines and perspectives.

“Marine reserves are a perfect storm of public policy and science — a contentious issue with a lot of complexity that this work will help to illuminate,” says Calvanese, who recently received a $5,000 Oregon Lottery grant to help support his project. “I see conflict as an opportunity. If we can harness that conflict constructively, it enriches the process and leads to meaningful change.”

In one of the Earth's most active fault zones, OSU geoscientist John Nabelek and colleagues are defining the forces that created Mt. Everest and threaten millions of people. (Photo courtesy of John Nabelek)

On a computer generated diagram of seismic profiles from Nepal and Tibet, John Nabelek traces a thin blue line. “That’s the interface between the Indian and the Eurasian tectonic plates,” he says. The earthquake-prone, mountainous terrain above it is home to an estimated 40 million people.

“It is very steep. In earthquakes, landslides come tumbling down,” says Nabelek, an associate professor in Oregon State University’s College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences. “Construction is not up to par, so there, you’re looking at a huge disaster.”

With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Nabelek leads an international team of scientists on a quest to understand the underlying geology of the Himalayas. In 2009, they created the most complete seismic image of the Earth’s crust and upper mantle in the region and discovered some unusual geologic features that may explain how it has evolved. The study is known as Hi-CLIMB, Himalayan-Tibetan Continental Lithosphere during Mountain Building.

“The research took us from the jungles of Nepal, with its elephants, crocodiles and rhinos, to the barren, wind-swept heights of Tibet in areas where nothing grew for hundreds of miles and there were absolutely no humans around,” Nabelek says. “That remoteness is one reason this region had never previously been completely profiled.”

Waterbed Geology

A lack of scientific consensus on how two continental plates collide has led to competing theories about the Himalayas. Some researchers have proposed that the heat generated by the collision has melted so much rock that the Tibetan plateau floats above it as though on a waterbed.

“There could be small pockets of fluid, but our study shows there are not large amounts of fluid here,” says Nabelek. “The building of Tibet is not a simple process. In part, the mountain building is similar to pushing dirt with a bulldozer, except in this case, the Indian sediments pile up into a wedge that is the lesser Himalayan mountains.”

The interface between the subducting Indian plate and the upper Himalayan and Tibetan crust is the Main Himalayan thrust fault, which reaches the surface in southern Nepal. The new images show that it extends from the surface to mid-crustal depths in central Tibet, but the shallow part of the fault sticks, leading to historically devastating mega-thrust earthquakes.

“The deep part is ductile and slips in a continuous fashion. Knowing the depth and geometry of this interface will advance research on a variety of fronts, including the interpretation of strain accumulation from GPS measurements prior to large earthquakes,” Nabelek adds. The study is continuing with funding from NSF and the Air Force Research Laboratory.

Nabelek also studies the Cascadia subduction zone, in which the relatively dense Juan de Fuca plate dives beneath North America. “The advantage of working in Tibet is that you can get on top of it. You can work on it. With the Cascadia, most of the mega-thrust is offshore about 100 miles.”

His emphasis in Cascadia is in the southern portion of the Juan de Fuca plate offshore from the Oregon-California border, a region known as the Gorda Deformation. Scientists don’t yet know why so much seismic activity occurs in this area. Most of the Juan de Fuca plate is relatively calm.

In another project funded by the NSF-EarthScope program, Nabelek will use the crustal imaging techniques employed in Nepal and Tibet to study the Earth’s crust under parts of Nevada. That project is scheduled to start this summer.

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To support OSU research on Earth systems, contact the OSU Foundation, 800-354-7281.

Scott Baker’s investigations of whale and dolphin DNA have taken him from Alaska’s humpback feeding grounds to the illegal marine mammal trade in Asia and an Academy Award-winning documentary. (Photo: David Baker)

For most Americans, eating a relative of Flipper or Keiko would be as unthinkable as dining on Lassie or Smokey Bear. But in some seafaring cultures, dolphins and whales are traditional foods, sold in supermarkets right alongside the fish fillets and beef cutlets.

The sale of meat from whales and dolphins accidentally drowned in fishing nets or left over from “scientific” whaling operations is allowed in some countries as “exceptions” to the international moratorium on commercial whaling. Trouble is, neither customers nor enforcers eyeing the packages of fresh or frozen steaks or stew meat can distinguish a minke whale taken in the scientific whaling program from, say, an illegally killed gray or humpback whale.

That’s where Scott Baker comes in.

The OSU conservation geneticist is one of the world’s foremost experts in using DNA to identify specific populations of cetaceans — whales, dolphins and porpoises — and thereby detect the unlawful sale of protected species. Baker travels frequently to Japan and South Korea, where he holes up in cramped hotel rooms in Tokyo or Seoul with his portable genetics lab, listening for a knock at the door. When the secret code is tapped out, he cracks open the door and a local collaborator, who has been covertly trolling grocery stores and sushi bars, furtively passes him a bagful of bloody meat for analysis.

This cloak-and-dagger science was documented in the Academy Award winning eco-thriller The Cove, in which Baker was cast (see sidebar).

“No scientist has contributed more to our understanding of cetacean genetics than Scott,” says Phillip Clapham, a cetacean scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “In particular, his innovative use of genetic analysis to detect and track illegal or unreported trade in whales and other wildlife has given scientists and managers a powerful tool to assess the extent of this traffic and its impact on populations. He’s been one of the major players in the field of whale biology worldwide.”

Catcher in the Bay

Height, as everyone knows, is an advantage in basketball games and presidential elections. But in marine science? Surprisingly, it can be — at least at New College of Sarasota, Florida. For a pioneering dolphin study launched while he was a student there, Baker’s 6-foot-4-inch stature gave him an edge over his shorter classmates. That’s because he could stand in the shallow waters of Sarasota Bay, his head well above the surface, while helping to use a seine net for the capture and release of wild dolphins.

“The researchers tended to enlist tall undergraduates for the hard work,” Baker says, laughing.

As a kid in Alabama, Baker vacationed on the Gulf Coast every summer with his dad (an electrical engineer and decorated veteran of Omaha Beach and the Battle of the Bulge) and his mom (an activist and humanitarian in the nuclear freeze movement and many other causes). “When you live in a place like Birmingham, the Gulf of Mexico is sort of like paradise — except for the mosquitoes and sand flies and jellyfish,” he says, grinning. The Gulf was where he first became intrigued by dolphins. But it was in that shallow Florida bay as he wrapped his arms around individual bottlenoses to process them for the study — weighing, measuring, tagging, drawing blood, taking tissue samples — where the animals etched a deeper impression on his psyche.

“Those kinds of things change your life,” says Baker, who left New Zealand’s University of Auckland in 2006 to become associate director of OSU’s Marine Mammal Institute. “How many people get to have an experience like that — capturing and releasing wild dolphins for a groundbreaking scientific study?” He adds, “We caught a lot of dolphins.”

Describing himself as “not terribly sentimental,” Baker nevertheless admits to being charmed by the joie de vivre of dolphins. Whales, on the other hand, are hard to relate to. He calls them “extremophiles,” a term borrowed from deep-ocean biologists who apply it to such exotic creatures as cold-seep tubeworms and giant hydrothermal vent clams — organisms that live in Earth’s most extreme environments. Not only have whales shed such basic mammalian characteristics as hind limbs during their evolutionary history, they can dive as deep as 5,000 feet, live as long as 200 years and travel as far as 6,000 miles during annual migrations.

“Whales are so alien,” Baker says. “They’re fascinating and magnificent animals, but it’s hard for us to imagine their world. Dolphins are much more like humans.”

Brain Train

During discussions of cetacean genetics, Scott Baker’s train of thought passes through a hundred switches, side rails and branch lines, diverging down one surprising aside after another. For him, everything in biology is connected to cetacean genetics.

Ask him about genetic diversity among whales, for instance, and he’ll tell you a story about cheetahs — a story with an Oregon angle, no less — from a Scientific American article that strongly influenced his early career. At Southern Oregon’s zoological park, Wildlife Safari, cheetahs were mysteriously dying of a common feline virus that causes only sniffles in housecats, suggesting a weakness in the big cats’ immune systems. The resulting gene-pool study by U.S. National Cancer Institute scientist Stephen O’Brien piqued Baker’s curiosity about the impact of genetic “bottlenecks” (large die-offs in a population caused by natural or human forces, such as the intensive whaling during the 19th and 20th centuries) on long-term species survival among the great whales.

Ask Baker about the human bond with wild animals, and he’ll engage you in an exploration ranging from the philosophy of Descartes to the methods of Jane Goodall to the quantifiable self-awareness of pigs, chimps, crows and (of course) dolphins. If you venture into the topic of evolution, you’ll dive with him into the Eve Hypothesis (the theory that all humans share DNA traceable to the emergence of Homo sapiens sapiens in Africa about 200,000 years ago), take a detour into Mendel’s peas, then veer from Darwin’s (mistaken) hunch that whales evolved from bears to the current scientific thinking: Today’s oceanic behemoths had a hoofed, hippo-like ancestor. If you’re still with him, you’ll careen around a hairpin turn, returning to the origins of modern humans to look in on the late pioneer of molecular evolution Allan Wilson of UC Berkeley, who discovered the “molecular clock” (using genetic mutations to date evolutionary changes).

Genes on Screen

By this point in the conversation, your brain will probably verge on overload. But Baker is just getting warmed up. As he talks, he frequently jumps up from his seat to scan his bookcase for a relevant article, or swivels to his computer screen to pull up a DNA barcode or digital map showing worldwide distribution of humpbacks, which he has studied since his years as a Ph.D. student at the University of Hawaii.

He’s at his most animated when talking about those early discoveries — such as one stunning, predawn revelation in a darkroom where he was developing “autoradiographic” images of humpback whale DNA. These were some of the first “DNA fingerprints” derived from small skin samples, which Baker had collected with a biopsy dart fired from an inflatable research boat in Southeast Alaska’s Inside Passage and Central California’s coastal waters, as well as in Hawaii and the Gulf of Maine. (Previously, whales and dolphins had been ID’d photographically by natural markings on their fins, flukes and flippers.) The finding he made that night in 1988 was a breakthrough in the just-emerging field of molecular ecology — using molecular markers for clues to relationships among individual whales and the ancestry of populations.

“I remember pulling out the first autorad that showed samples from feeding grounds in Southeast Alaska side-by-side with samples from California, and there was no overlap between the two populations,” he says. “All individuals from Southeast Alaska had one pattern, and not one individual from California had that pattern. It was like, wow!”

These population-level variations in DNA, which geneticists call “fixed differences,” pointed to ancient migration pathways swum again and again and again over tens of thousands of years. The black-and-white barcode he stared at that night supported his hypothesis that migratory routes from winter calving to summer feeding grounds had persisted for hundreds of generations — in other words, across evolutionary time. Biologists call this enduring continuity “maternally directed fidelity,” that is, patterns taught from mother to calf and reflected over eons in mitochondrial (maternally inherited) DNA, which scientists denote as mtDNA.

“This was one of the first discoveries we made using molecular methods,” he says. “What we were seeing in whales was a very distinct population substructure. The markers showed that despite their mobility, despite their ability to travel 12,000 miles roundtrip on each migration, these animals keep returning to the same place year after year, generation after generation. They don’t wander around. It was puzzling, because these aren’t terrestrial animals isolated by canyons and rivers and mountains — they’re out there in the ocean with no obvious barriers. Who would have thought the ocean would be so subdivided? Who would have thought whales would treat the ocean the same way bears treat their habitat, inheriting their mothers’ home range and returning there each year?”

Scott Baker was featured in "The Cove"

In the seaside village of Taiji, Japan, there’s a jarring juxtaposition: Jolly-looking tour buses shaped like happy dolphins putter up and down the streets by day, while by night fishermen secretly slaughter hundreds of panic-stricken dolphins in a nearby inlet and sell them as meat.

This sinister irony permeates the Academy Award-winning movie, The Cove, produced by the Ocean Preservation Society. Scientific adviser and cast member Scott Baker is delighted by the accolades, not because they widen his fame outside science circles but because recognition from the Critics’ Choice Movie Awards and the Sundance Film Festival means broader exposure for the movie, which critics have characterized as an “eco-thriller.” That, in turn, means more international pressure to end the carnage.

“There has been tremendous resistance to the movie in Japan,” says Baker, a leader in international efforts to uncover black-market trade in products from protected species of whales and dolphins. “The Tokyo International Film Festival initially turned down the film, but under pressure from American actors like Ben Stiller, they agreed to allow one showing outside the formal festival. The international press was relegated to the back of the auditorium.”

Baker, associate director of OSU’s Marine Mammal Institute, acts as the film’s scientific voice on dolphin biology and the health risks to humans who eat dolphin meat, which is high in mercury (mercury levels are concentrated in organisms that are, like dolphins, high up in the food chain). As the world’s first scientist to use DNA to identify whale species being butchered for human consumption, Baker appears in the movie both as an expert “talking head” and as a DNA detective, hunkered over a portable genetics lab in a Tokyo hotel testing samples purchased, covertly, in Japanese fish markets.

“We spent days filming in that hotel room — a room not much bigger than my office,” recalls Baker. He describes director Louie Psihoyos as “visionary but meticulous,” shooting “tons of film” to tell the story of the annual killing of more than 1,200 dolphins in Taiji.

Baker’s science-based scenes of DNA identification and his comments on the threat of mercury contamination in dolphin meat are a counterpoint to the movie’s main storyline: An intrepid team of cinematographers and activists (including the dolphin trainer of the 1960s TV series Flipper), wearing camouflage and night-vision goggles, risk arrest and even death to capture video and underwater acoustics during the slaughter.

Besides being a gripping piece of filmmaking, the movie highlights a heartbreaking issue of massive proportions: the international black market in wildlife. From elephant tusks and rhino horns to bighorn sheep antlers and panther pelts, the illegal trade in endangered animals is worth an estimated $5 billion to $8 billion a year worldwide. Cetaceans are lucrative commodities in that grisly enterprise. In Japan or Korea, for instance, a whale killed in coastal fishing nets can sell for more than $100,000 wholesale. Dolphins, too, bring in fat cash: Aquariums pay $150,000 for a live animal.

But it’s the dead ones that most worry Baker, a longtime delegate to the International Whaling Commission (IWC). Despite the IWC’s 1986 moratorium on whaling, Japan, Korea, Iceland and Norway continue the hunt, either under the guise of science or under an “objection” (basically, a rejection of the commission’s authority to regulate whaling). Loopholes in the commission’s 1986 moratorium, it turns out, are big enough for a whale to swim through — and die in. A “scientific whaling” loophole allows a limited number of whales to be killed for research and the remains to be sold. A “bycatch whaling” loophole allows fishermen to sell whales and dolphins that become entangled in fishing nets. Hundreds of protected animals die unreported each year because of the laxity of IWC rules and regs, Baker says. “The continued sale of ‘legal’ whale products acts as a cover for other illegal, unreported and undocumented hunting,” he argues.

Still, whales are afforded at least some measure of protection by the IWC. Dolphins, on the other hand, have none at all from the IWC or other international conventions (although many individual nations have outlawed dolphin killing).

Forensic genetics is a potent weapon in the fight to save wildlife. Baker’s technique — a method of quickly amplifying segments of DNA called a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) — is the same one used by crime-scene investigators to match “perps” to body fluids, hair and other tissue they leave behind. PCR is used for all sorts of investigations, from nabbing moose poachers to detecting cystic fibrosis in eight-celled human embryos. Indeed, Baker and his Ph.D. student Merel Dalebout were using PCR in 2002 when they discovered a new species of beaked whale, the first new whale species in 15 years and the first to be described primarily by DNA.

Now, with help from the fishing industry, hydrographic contractors (David Evans and Associates and Fugro), the State of Oregon and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Chris Goldfinger is leading a $7.3 million mapping project that will pinpoint rocky reefs, depressions and navigational hazards. The Oregon State University associate professor of oceanic and atmospheric sciences says the new images will help fishermen, scientists and coastal managers who need to manage marine habitats and to develop better tsunami models.

Over the next two years, two vessels out of Newport — OSU’s Pacific Storm, captained by Bob Pedro, and the Michele Ann, captained by Bob Eder and Geogon Lapham — will help researchers collect detailed images over more than 34 percent of the seafloor out to the state’s three-mile limit. The project will expand existing coverage with a half-meter resolution, including 75 percent of rocky reefs, depressions and boulders.

Goldfinger led an earlier effort to map Oregon’s territorial sea, using existing data on seafloor habitats identified in thousands of bottom samples and soundings. The map and many other marine spatial layers are available online. New products from this project will be distributed through the same Web site.

For more about the mapping project, see this OSU news release:

New Funds Will Help Create Oregon’s Most  Accurate Seafloor Mapping System, August 12, 2009

To support ocean research at OSU, contact the Oregon State University Foundation.

“I realized pretty quickly that they weren’t left over from a clambake,” marine geologist Erwin Suess recalls wryly.

Far from being beach-party cuisine, the mega-shellfish evidenced one of the most stunning discoveries ever made in ocean science. Superheated water seeping from deep-sea volcanic rifts, discovered near the Galapagos Islands during a 1977 expedition led by OSU oceanographer Jack Corliss, jolted the fields of marine chemistry and geology. The implications for scientists’ understanding of heat exchange and geochemical balance across the planet were profound. Even more startling was the host of outlandish creatures found thriving in the sulfurous, sunless depths.

These mysterious species – the gargantuan clams, red-tipped tube worms, ghostly crabs and other weird residents of the ocean’s hydrothermal vents – rocked biology to its core. Animals subsisting on gasses instead of sunlight had never been imagined, let alone witnessed from the portal of a manned submersible. These “chemosynthetic” organisms, scientists realized, could hold clues to life’s very origins in Earth’s ancient chemical soup.

“Here were animals living in the dark, in warm and chemical-laden water streaming out of the earth. It was as if these organisms had been left behind as the rest of the planet evolved toward the sun.”

— Joseph Cone,
Fire Under the Sea

On Their Shoulders

These discoveries underpin the work of a whole new generation of researchers in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences (CEOAS). When Ph.D. candidate Brandon Briggs, for instance, hunkers over his microscope to study methane-making and methane-consuming microbes from the ocean’s subsurface biosphere, he is carrying on the legacy of Corliss, Suess and dozens of other marine geologists, physicists, chemists and biologists who, over the program’s 50-year history, have elevated COAS into one of the nation’s top-three oceanographic research institutions (along with Scripps and Woods Hole).

“I was drawn to the interdisciplinary nature of the research here,” says Briggs, whose passion for environmental microbiology took hold in his home state of Idaho. “You have to understand math, physics, chemistry and geology along with the microbiology. You have to be able to converse with people in all the different disciplines.”

Briggs’ research is anchored in a COAS discovery closely related to hydrothermal vents: ocean floor “cold seeps.” First located in 1984 at the Cascadia Subduction Zone by Suess and Professor LaVern Kulm, the cold-water vent systems leak methane and other carbon-rich fluids from decaying life forms buried in subsurface sediments. The seeps support their own unique collections of “extremophiles” – organisms that exist in ecosystems devoid of light or oxygen. The gasses not only feed such oddities as the “seep tubeworm” (which can live 250 years) but also play a role in another deep-sea anomaly being studied by Briggs under the advisement of geomicrobiologist Rick Colwell: gas hydrates.

Caged in Ice

Methane in ocean sediments can, under certain conditions of temperature and pressure, become locked into a lattice of water molecules to form ice-like structures. Once thought to exist naturally only on Saturn’s moons, hydrates have been found not only in ocean deposits around the globe but also in polar permafrost.

As a potential energy source, hydrates have gotten the attention of the U.S. Department of Energy, the agency funding Briggs’ and Colwell’s research. But the researchers warn that exploiting this resource must be approached with great caution. That’s because methane is a potent greenhouse gas and hydrates are highly unstable; their gaseous “guest” molecules escape rapidly when the “host” latticework melts. This poses serious worries for environmental science, Briggs says. A runaway greenhouse effect could be triggered if hydrate fields were disturbed by earthquakes, rising ocean temperatures, changing sea levels, deep-sea oil drilling, melting permafrost or ocean-floor mining, releasing massive amounts of trapped methane, the researcher explains.

“When temperatures rise, hydrates release their methane,” he adds. “There’s evidence that methane from hydrates may have been released into the atmosphere the last time Earth was really hot, about 55 million years ago during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.”

Examining core samples from Hydrate Ridge off the coast of Newport, Oregon, as well as from Canada’s Vancouver Island and India’s Bay of Bengal, Briggs is documenting microbial distribution using DNA analysis and studying biochemical pathways of microbes living in and around hydrates. Of special interest is the balance between microbes that make methane and those that use methane, the latter providing a brake on the accumulation of this gas in the environment. One central question is: If the rate of methane production were to speed up because of, say, rising temperatures, could the methane users keep up, or would they become overwhelmed and lose their buffering function?

“We’re interested in the amount of methane produced in deep marine sediments, what controls the rate of methanogenesis, and how that biogenic methane factors into the global carbon cycle,” says Colwell, a member of OSU’s Subsurface Biosphere Initiative who came to the university in 2006 from the Idaho National Laboratory.

The answers may help scientists predict harmful off-gassing from melting hydrates. They may also guide decisions about carbon sequestration and energy exploitation in the ocean.

“I’m motivated to find answers to the pressing questions of global climate change,” says Briggs.

Already, his research into the microbes’ biochemical pathways is yielding intriguing findings. He has, for instance, identified microorganisms living in “biofilms” – “slimy, pinkish-orange” coatings of bacteria – feeding on methane 60 feet deep in Indian Ocean sediments. “To have that amount of biomass that deep in ocean sediments is surprising,” Briggs says. “This hasn’t been reported anywhere else.”

On the Web: Exploring extreme deep-sea habitats has become a passion for Brandon Briggs and other students in Rick Colwell’s lab. Learn more here

Jack Barth is a leader in ocean monitoring. (Photo: Jim Folts)

Ocean science is confronted with many unknowns about the intricate interplay of physics, chemistry and biology in Earth’s vast oceans. In this era of climatic flux, better understanding of sensitive ocean systems has taken on new urgency.

OSU oceanographers Jack Barthand Murray Levine are refining and testing an innovative sensing system designed to track trends in temperature, current velocity, salinity, nitrates, dissolved oxygen, suspended particle load and chlorophyll concentration. Known as CAPABLE (Coastal Autonomous Profiling and Boundary Layer System), the gear, which is moored to the seafloor, must hold up to battering from ferocious seas as it collects data and monitors coastal oceans in real time. The project, supported by $884,252 from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, includes mechanical and software upgrades along with four field tests over two years.

Learn more about OSU’s ARRA-funded research in human health, climate change, the oceans and education here.

Doubling carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leads to lower average winter precipitation in Northwestern Oregon, according to model results. (map courtesy of Steve Hostetler)

You can’t just walk into the data center in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences (CEOAS). The sign on the door says you need a pass card. There should be another sign too: Caution, planetary experiments in progress. Inside, computer clusters churn 24/7, spinning out information about ocean currents, winds, air temperatures, ice sheets and flows of energy. Lights blink and fans drone as they cool the machines that run calculations on command from scientists who may be just down the hall or on another continent. In this case, proximity doesn’t matter.

Andreas Schmittner‘s office is a 30-second walk from the data center, but the CEOAS assistant professor doesn’t have to go there to check on his experiments. From his desk, he logs on to his Linux computer cluster at the center and reviews the status of 20 or more projects that he may have running simultaneously.

Schmittner is an oceanographer who devotes himself to climate models, those mathematical descriptions of the real world that allow scientists to envision possible sea levels, ice sheets and temperature and precipitation patterns on a warmer planet. Grounded in physics and tested against real data from the past, climate models range from the simple to the complex. Think of them as alternative futures.

“Models should be regarded as 
tools to understand the climate system better and to address research questions,” says Schmittner. “Depending on the research question you have, you use different tools. Just like in your workshop, if you need to screw something down, you don’t need a wrench. You use a screwdriver.”

In short, models have become the high-tech workhorses of climate science. Scientists rely on them to consider how coastal communities, food and water supplies, forests and weather would fare on a changing Earth.

More than 20 years ago, OSU researchers created models to study global atmospheric circulation and the Pacific Ocean system known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation. Today’s models are more sophisticated and the goals more ambitious: to make them more realistic (aligned with actual climate data), to incorporate all significant processes and to identify the uncertainties that inevitably affect modeling outcomes.

With better models come results that illuminate how the world may change in coming decades. In a report published in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles that generated headlines in 2008, Schmittner showed that even if greenhouse gas emissions increase gradually until 2100 and are then virtually eliminated by 2300, the planet would continue to warm for the next 200 years or more.

In 2005, he and colleagues in Europe and North America reported that doubling the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (now about 35 percent higher than before the Industrial Revolution) could affect the North Atlantic with steep plankton declines and a 25 percent slowdown in currents that carry heat toward Europe. Actual observations based on water temperature and salinity suggest that currents may actually be slowing, but scientists are still debating what the data mean. “We have to get more observational data and improve our models,” Schmittner told the BBC.

An Uncertain Future

Moderate increases in average winter temperatures occur in Washington and Oregon when carbon dioxide is doubled in the atmosphere, according to model results. (map courtesy of Steve Hostetler)

Future scenarios amount to potential conditions in a changing world, not to firm predictions. “We can’t say exactly how much warmer the climate is going to be in 50 years,” says Karen Shell, an assistant professor in CEOAS. “Part of that is uncertainty in the science and how we translate the science into the models. You can’t take every single cloud and put it into a model. We don’t have the computational resources to do that.”

Shell came to OSU in 2008 from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. She studies variations among the two dozen or so global circulation models used by the international climate science community. In the course of her work, she downloads so much data that she has generated calls from OSU network technicians. “They were concerned that my computer had been infected by a virus,” she says.

Data from modeling runs and from the field (including satellites, ocean buoys and monitoring stations on the polar ice sheets) are a modeler’s bread and butter. They contain clues about what drives the climate system over long periods of time. Shell and her colleagues analyze how models treat factors such as solar energy flows at the top of the atmosphere (how energy is absorbed and reflected) and the distribution of atmospheric water vapor from the equator to the poles.

“If you can figure out what’s causing the spread (among model results) and link that to satellite data, you can get clues about cause and effect,” says Shell. “That’s how you make progress. It’s slow progress, but it has to be done.

“I love what I do,” she adds, noting that model results provide important information for responding to the likely consequences of climate change.

Bringing It Home

Less summer precipitation in Eastern Washington and parts of Oregon could occur if carbon dioxide doubles in the atmosphere, according to model results. (map courtesy of Steve Hostetler)

Over the past two decades, models have improved in both scope (how many physical and biological processes they incorporate) and resolution (the grid or spatial density of a region). They enable researchers to look at what might be in store for Klamath Basin water supplies or for forest fire risks in the western United States. Hydrologist Steve Hostetler has worked on such regional issues for about 20 years for the U.S. Geological Survey. The courtesy professor in the OSU Department of Geosciences continues to work on current and past climate conditions with colleagues at the USGS, OSU and the University of Oregon.

“It’s very collaborative with lots of different ways of looking at things, lots of different types of expertise. I seldom do things on my own,” he says.

In 2006, the National Science Foundation’s Paleoclimate Program supported this network with five-year grants totaling $3.3 million to OSU and partners at UO and the University of Minnesota. The goal is to develop a detailed picture of climate change from ocean records, ice core samples, terrestrial cave formations and global climate models.

In the late 1980s, Hostetler was doing fieldwork for the USGS when he became interested in paleoclimate, focusing on trends over the last 50,000 years. Since then, he has used the results of global and regional atmospheric models to estimate how climate influences water balances and fire frequency in the West.

For the Klamath Basin, modeling can improve the accuracy of multi-year evaporation estimates, Hostetler has reported. Evaporation is critical for determining how much water is available from year to year. Under a changing climate, accurate predictions will be necessary for resolving the region’s legendary water disputes.

In 2006, Hostetler and two USGS scientists co-authored the Atlas of Climatic Controls of Wildfire in the Western United States. For the period 1980-2000, their maps show how fires were closely linked with monthly water and energy balances in eight ecoregions, including the coastal and interior Pacific Northwest. Their report could lead to better predictions of wildfire risk.

“A lot of modeling is really mundane, boring stuff. But when you complete something and can look at the results and interpret what’s going on, that’s the payoff. These maps are the payoff,” Hostetler says.

Mining the Data

Doubling carbon dioxide in the atmosphere leads to increased summer temperatures across Oregon, according to model results. (map courtesy of Steve Hostetler)

Behind the doors at the CEOAS data center are the information systems that make such results possible. “We have the networking, computational and storage infrastructure to move large amounts of data,” says manager Chuck Sears, who salts conversation with talk of “terabytes” (one terabyte equals a million million data points) and “arrays” (large tables of data).

Models aren’t the center’s only source of data. Continuous streams of information from satellites, ocean buoys and other monitoring systems flow into the center’s databanks, enabling scientists to test and to refine their models. And since maps and other visual displays enhance communication among scientific teams and with the public, the center offers state-of-the-art visualization systems as well.

“We’ve created a production studio,” says Sears, “and we’ve enabled 2,000 different devices to be connected outside the center, as if they were in the center. These devices range from desktop computers to handheld devices such as iPhones.”

Increasingly, collaborative climate science is being done in remote offices and at meetings and other locations, not on the premises of computing centers. “Ultimately you have to get all of those data out for real work,” says Mark Abbott, dean of CEOAS and member of the National Science Board. “It’s going to be personalized and local. You’ll be able to get to it everywhere. The key is the balance between what’s in the center and what’s out on your desktop, your PDA (personal desktop assistant) or what you have in your home.”

Access to a variety of such devices allows scientists at CEOAS to act like symphony conductors, Abbott adds, orchestrating the different tools they need. “If you’re a real woodwinds expert, you just use that, but if you really want to use some other instruments, you can do that too.

“Supercomputer centers do great things,” he adds, “but the excitement is out on the edges,” where scientific teams are sharpening our views of a changing planet.

For more about climate modeling at OSU:

Philip Mote to Lead Oregon’s New Climate Research Institute, January 6, 2009

New Study: Long-Term Global Warming May be Tough to Reverse, February 25, 2008

Research Team to Explore Past Climate by Looking for Triggers to Rapid Change, June 28, 2006

Atlantic Current Shutdown Could Disrupt Global Ocean Food Chain, April 5, 2005

To support research in the College of Earth, Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences, contact the OSU Foundation

The Oregon coast is both laboratory and teaching arena for Jane Lubchenco (Photo: Kelly James)

The nomination of Oregon State University marine ecologist Jane Lubchenco to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reflects OSU’s growing leadership in federal environmental science programs. If confirmed, Lubchenco will be the second OSU scientist to head NOAA. Former OSU president John Byrne served as NOAA Administrator from 1981 to 1984. The agency’s $4 billion budget supports research and monitoring of fisheries, weather and marine and coastal resources.

Also serving in national agency leadership roles are five professors in OSU’s College of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences (COAS):

• Michael Freilich, director of the Earth Sciences Division at NASA
• Timothy J. Cowles, program director for the Ocean Observatories Initiative, the National Science Foundation’s signature research project on climate change
• Kelly Falkner, director of NSF’s Antarctic Ocean and Climate Sciences program
• Jim McManus, associate program director of the chemical oceanography program at the National Science Foundation
• Mark Abbott, COAS dean and member of the National Science Board (and co-chair of Oregon’s Global Warming Commission)

OSU scientists also chair federal government committees that guide programs in such areas as marine reserves, social science research, public health, biomedicine and forest resources.

The rockfish tank captivates Newport first-grader and oceanography buff Noah Goodwin-Rice during a visit to the Visitor Center at the Hatfield Marine Science Center (Photo: Jim Folts)

From their oceanfront timeshare in Newport, Oregon, Jerry and Diane Plante were enjoying the view one September morning when they spotted an unusual vessel. Peering seaward through their high-powered binoculars, the retirees could make out a black trawler named Pacific Storm. Tethered to it was a yellow, donut-shaped buoy. Poking out of the buoy was some kind of cylindrical shaft.

Intrigued, the Plantes watched and wondered as the boat and buoy bobbed on the distant swells for four days. “We couldn’t figure out what they were doing,” says Jerry, a former fraud investigator from Sherwood, Oregon. Adds Diane, a retired schoolteacher: “I don’t know why we thought the boat was so fascinating, but we did.”

Then, soon after the mysterious boat and buoy disappeared from their picture window, they happened to spot the Pacific Storm tied up near the Yaquina Bay Bridge. Excited, they buttonholed a man working on the dock behind a sign reading “authorized personnel only.” He told them they had been armchair witnesses to a floating wave-energy experiment conducted by OSU researchers. He was a member of the science team and suggested they could learn more at the nearby Hatfield Marine Science Center. And that’s how the curious couple wound up in the Visitor Center raptly studying an exhibit about OSU’s pioneering work in wave energy, oblivious to crowds of school kids jostling around them.

Jerry and Diane Plante are what social scientists these days call “free-choice learners.”

Choosing To Learn

“Much of what we learn, we learn because we want to, because events in our lives intrinsically motivate us to find out more,” explain Lynn Dierking and John Falk, Oregon Sea Grant professors in OSU’s Science and Mathematics Education Department in the College of Science. “Under these conditions, we learn not only what we want, but also where, when, and with whom we want. This is free-choice learning, learning that is guided by learners’ needs and interests – the learning that people engage in throughout their lives to find out more about what is useful, compelling, or just plain interesting to them. The Plantes are great examples of free-choice learners in action.”

Free-choice learning, a term coined a decade ago by Falk and Dierking, is a new addition to OSU’s graduate degree programs and research agenda in science and math education. The initiative launched by Sea Grant and the College of Science is designed both to teach and to study how people learn – particularly about science and math – outside formal school settings. Such learning is “incremental” (gathered in bits and pieces, here and there) and “idiosyncratic” (filtered through the learner’s one-of-a-kind lens), research tells us. Driven by intellectual curiosities and practical needs for information, most science and math learning happens not as we sit in a classroom, but as we explore the world around us.

Unique in the United States, OSU’s Free-Choice Science and Mathematics Learning program gives graduate students a theoretical grounding in the cultural, social and physical contexts that influence learning. Kids and adults alike build knowledge actively using their highly individualized prior knowledge and experience, the scholars say. With this “constructivist” theory as a foundation, the researchers are designing ways to enhance free-choice learning environments such as museums, science centers and Boys and Girls clubs. Along the way, they hope to forge stronger links among the myriad players in education’s “invisible free-choice learning infrastructure,” a web of institutions and information sources that includes zoos, aquariums, botanical gardens, libraries, national parks, natural history museums, Web sites, TV shows and after-school programs. Other research is delving into how this infrastructure intersects with schools, universities and workplaces.

“Research strongly suggests that the more the separate influential spheres of family, school, work and elective learning overlap in people’s lives, the more likely people are to become successful lifelong learners,” note Falk and Dierking, international leaders in this new discipline. In short, it’s the synergy among spheres that counts.

Before coming to Oregon State, Falk founded and directed the Institute for Learning Innovation in Annapolis, Maryland, a private, nonprofit organization devoted to understanding and facilitating free-choice learning. Dierking was the institute’s associate director.