Madelaine Katz catches a perfect day at Oceanside

Ever since I was very small, I’ve been enraptured by the animal kingdom. And I was very lucky: My mom fueled this fire by taking me to as many zoos, aquariums, wildlife centers and nature parks as possible on our family travels. It was a big part of my upbringing. Now, as a semi-autonomous and somewhat-functioning adult, I still manage to find ways to go to these places as much as humanly possible.

The most recent of these visits was to the Oregon Coast Aquarium.

After the exhausting whirlwind that was my START orientation at Oregon State this summer, I was feeling a little bit panicked about the whole moving-across-the-continent-for-college ordeal. Being a native East Coaster from North Carolina, the move to Oregon was going to be quite a shift for me. I was excited, yes, but a heavy dose of nerves was definitely there too. And what was the one thing that could make me feel myself?

“Dad, can we drive out to Newport? There’s an aquarium there!”

And so we did. It was mostly empty on that sleepy Wednesday afternoon, and I happily roamed around the exhibits, lost and immersed in my own underwater world.

Rounding the corner from some dozing sea otters, I approached my favorite animal, the Great Pacific Octopus. As I walked toward the tank, however, a disgruntled family was heading in the opposite direction, expressing frustration. “Why didn’t it come out?” they were complaining. “Why was it hiding in a hole like that?”

As they made their way noisy way out, I slowly walked up to the glass window of the octopus’ tank. It would appear completely devoid of life if it were not for the single, telltale tentacle spilling out from a small dark crevice in the corner.

Even though I couldn’t see more than this lone tentacle, a flood of simple respect washed over me for this incredible creature. The intelligence of these mollusks is legendary among biologists. I’ve heard many a story of their cunning and wit, whether it be outsmarting predatory sharks three times their size, or figuring out how to make a coconut shell a useful tool for shelter. I closed my eyes and placed my hand on the glass, and smiled to myself. I was, and still am, in love with the fact that these animals exist in the world.

I sighed, and opened my eyes. And splayed out on the bottom of the tank, big and bold and totally orange, was the octopus, come out from hiding in its watery cave. And I swear it was looking at me.

Some part of me will always doubt it, but the larger and more playful side of me believes that the animal felt what I was feeling and came out to say hello, or at least to investigate. A volunteer told me later that the nocturnal octopus rarely comes out during the day, and that I was lucky to be able to witness it.

Lucky, yes.  I felt wonderfully lucky to be able to share that moment with that phenomenal cephalopod. But was it happenstance? Who knows, but that creature sure had a wonderful effect on me, and maybe, just maybe, I had a similar effect on him.

Madelaine Katz is a freshman in the University Honors College majoring in zoology.

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.

Feel the soft skin of an octopus or the spiny texture of a sea urchin at the Visitor Center at the Hatfield Marine Science Center in Newport.

Learn which native plants are adaptable for home landscaping and see drought-resistant and wheelchair accessible gardens at more than 17 locations managed by OSU-trained master gardeners.

View a colorful exhibit in the State Capitol Rotunda that reveals all the drama and tumult of Oregon’s geologic history.

Watch archaeologists literally dig in Oregon’s past at Champoeg State Park, Oregon’s first provincial capital, and at Civil War era Fort Yamhill.

With this interactive map, click on the dots, learn what you can do and begin making your plans. (NOTE: Best viewed in Firefox or Safari. Internet Explorer may not display content.)

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.