The Log | School News
Nicholas School Faculty Make Headlines at AAAS Conference
The Nicholas School was well represented
at the American Association for the Advancement of Science
2004 meeting held in Seattle in February. Here are briefs
of three presentations.
Advanced Sensors, Computing Systems
Tracking Sea Animals Worldwide
Emerging new technology is allowing scientists to monitor
the movements and behavior of marine life over the entire
vast expanses of Earth’s oceans and thus improve conservation
efforts. And that technology demands more expansive and cooperative
ways of doing research as well as better ways to analyze the
exploding amounts of information, Duke University investigators
say.
“Now scientists can put tags on bluefin tuna,
blue whales and wandering albatrosses and follow what they
do for the entire year,” said marine mammal expert Andrew
Read, an assistant professor of marine conservation
biology at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment and Earth
Sciences. “At Duke, we’re putting satellite-linked transmitters
on three species of sea turtles. The problem now is what you
do with that massive quantity of data to make the best use
of it?”
Added Duke researcher Patrick
Halpin, “You have an operational oceanography
community that’s developing a lot of satellite remote sensing
data and models.” Halpin is a Nicholas School assistant professor
of the practice of landscape ecology who focuses on geospatial
technologies, such as geographic information systems (GIS)
and satellite remote sensing.
“Biologists are collecting data from ship surveys
or aerial surveys, or tagging animals and tracking them through
time. But we need to merge these data together. It’s very
challenging and we’re just beginning to develop common frameworks
to analyze this dynamic ocean data in a useful manner,” said
Halpin, whose laboratory specializes in using computers to
overlay such information.
Goal Of Ocean ‘Iron Fertilization’
Said Still Unproved
After a decade of small-scale testing, researchers are still
uncertain whether seeding ocean waters with tanker loads of
iron particles could alleviate global warming, said a Duke
University scientist involved in the studies.
The hypothesis of these experiments is that
fertilizing the oceans with iron could sufficiently boost
photosynthetic rates of floating patches of microscopic plants
called phytoplankton to remove large amounts of carbon dioxide
from Earth’s atmosphere, said
Richard Barber, a professor of biological
oceanography at Duke’s Nicholas School of the Environment
and Earth Sciences.
According to the hypothesis, extra carbon dioxide
absorbed during photosynthesis would be converted into plant
tissue that would then sink deep into the ocean, removing
the gas from circulation for long periods. But, so far, “that
result has not been shown,” Barber said.
Ongoing Studies May Help Determine
How Climate Change Contributed to Disappearance of Ancient
People in Bolivia
From about 600-1100 A.D. a sophisticated culture erected monuments
and buildings on a 11,400 foot high plateau called the Altiplano
in the city of Tiwanaku in what is now Bolivia. Then Tiwanaku
declined and vanished, perhaps due to an extended drought.
How climate change contributed to such ancient
Altiplano events as Tiwanaku’s disappearance has been difficult
to establish in a region where reliable records have been
available for only 150 years, Nicholas School geology professor
Paul Baker
told a forum on Peopling the High Plateaus during the American
Association for the Advancement of Science’s 2004 annual meeting
in Seattle.
But emerging new information gathered by Baker
and other researchers may help answer that question. In 2001,
Baker and colleagues found evidence from cores lifted from
what is now an Altiplano salt flat that the area was wet during
so-called “Bond Events” occurring during the last 25,000 years.
More recent coring on the Altiplano’s Lake Titicaca shows
evidence that lake levels were higher during “Bond Events”
occurring in the last 10,000 years.
Bond Events record times when other studies have
shown that the surfaces of parts of the North Atlantic Ocean
were unusually cold. And evidence suggests such cold times
appear to be wet times in the Andes, Baker said at the seminar,
and the wet periods end abruptly 1,000 years ago.
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