Optimism or nebulism

Again, I am in the lab, sinking into the swivel chair in flourescent light optimism. My standards are all faring well today creating nice linear calibration curves---to accurately determine what is in my glacier samples... all is well so far (knock on plastic) in spite of the fact that the glass sample chamber was pink with other people's high concentration samples yesterday. Pink is the color of evil and iron oxidation. Anthony boiled the pink away in nitric acid, and my blanks are clean to the ppt. That's a few drops in the ocean. I'm also writing a paper. Its not taking long. Writing is the easy part... its the ICPMS that is the hard part. The instrument has so many special parts... the contamination of cones, the plugging of nebulizers, the settling of sediment...the paper is not taking long at all... I finished most of it last week...

To more adventures in science in the new year!

2000- Juneau Icefield Research Program

It's the summer after I started my Master's program at OSU. Ben (who I later stumbled upon in Antarctica at 2 in the morning in the McMurdo cafeteria as his disrespectful roommate entertained too much company) and I led a few students down the Gilkey Trench to explore supraglacial melt ponds in the compression zone below the ice falls. We spent all day descending the nunatak adjacent to the ice falls. Exhausted... physically and mentally. We trudged to camp at the medial moraine a kilometer away, the pace quickens with dreams of dinner. I'm ready to be a hero, carrying with me some much sought after mac and cheese. By the time we reach camp, we are drooling... but prematurely. A grizzly bear looms a few kilometers away. And it's plodding our way. Four of us jump on a boulder to match the bear in size, hoping to divert its course. TO no avail!!! We are feeble compared to this trucklike animal. We are nervous.

We radio our above glacier campmates, they advise us to leave fast. We grab some fuel to "light and throw "at the bear--- or if we escape, to use for dinner...

Suddenly the bear is within 100 meters of us. We don't cramponing until 1 a.m., carefully navigating over watery streams... insightful revelations from the undergraduate with us...fear lays it all out....

That night, we rest on the firm and spiky ground of the nunatek to our west. Precariously steep, we set rocks underneath---they'll be no plummeting in the middle of the night. I'm thanking my cheap immitation thermarest that can be blown up in 3 segments... to huge pillows. I sleep like cotton. Before my eyes sand, we witness a spectacular aurora, dining on the finest mac and cheese. Ben and I had a laugh imagining throwing a fire bomb at the grizzly. Its funny from our perch.

The picture is from the next morning.

in a white cave

I'm in the windowless basement of Mendenhall Labratory. It is desolate,the hum of the ICPMS and the faint smell of acid... it feels like a cave, but warm, and I am here by choice. I'm lucky that it is warm, because the furnace is constantly failing, and we must look at our own breath. Similarly, the air-conditioning in the summer fails and we must suffer in our long sleeves(lest the acid drop on our bare skin).

As for now, my mind is sterilized by the hum and I'm having difficulty taking notes, let alone writing Christmas cards, or better yet, looking at data...

My mind drifts worse than the instrument, I'm thinking back fourth graders..... I lit a match and put it in a bottle (lowering the air pressure), then I stuck a hard boiled egg on top and WHOMP, The egg was suctioned in with a thud.

1998

Its the summer of 1998.

Today it is hot and bright. It is 80 degrees going on Mojave the whole week I am alone, except for the final snowy morning my socks freeze like daggers to the laundry cord. My skin turns bright red and I carefully inspect by looking into the blurry lid of my cooking pot. I dutifully measure the lake level in this trapped lake of the Illicillawaet Glacier every morning, noon, and night. The only thru-hiker will be a fury grizzly man whose yellows teeth make me feel even younger. I smile and pretend to be a lumberjack. Puffing my arms out to defeat him should he gnash his stained fangs.

Soon my supplies dwindle and I am low on food and saline solution. That night a beautiful bird helicopter drops me my dreamed of supplies... sadly there is no saline, no food, only some hot chocolate and some rum. Did I miscommunicate??? I feel resigned, having a dinner of kidney beans, laughing more than crying because I am 19 and baffled. It's so beautiful I want to stay forever, journaling my surroundings, becoming one with this melting sad glacier.... and with only booze, one journal, and scratchy contacts I suspect my stay will have to end soon. It is in this sunset that I take a deep breathe, lasting well beyond my hike out.

Illicillawaet picture from: (this most resembles the glacier as I remember it in 1998) www.ljplus.ru/img2/pycaky/Illecillewaet-Glacier,-British-Columbia,-Canada.jpg

1997

Its August 1997 and I'm in Iceland looking for my tent. Maybe it has blown into the future... a katabatic breath pushed it down valley while we were exploring. Returning to camp we found only Chris's tent survived unscathed. The ShopKo tent. Other tents scattered across the terminus of the Svinafellsjökull ..French tourists rescued our luggage saving our thermals (to wear well into the next few decades). And we stayed in a hostel with warm-faced blond people. Icelandic winds are hostile. While the land is forgivingly warm...soothing geothermal pools. (below- growling at the glacier that ate my tent...)

Slow Drip

Andrew Revkin, NY Times Science Writer, spoke yesterday at the Ohio State University " The Daily Planet: A Journalists Search for Sustainability from the Amazon to the Arctic". Revkin, who has written climate change stories for decades, declared, "global warming is not new to the media". Climate skeptics and new climate studies receive much more media attention. Revkin acknowledged we've known for many years that fossil fuel burning elevates carbon dioxide and creates temperature rise. Revkin said this is a "slow drip story". Greenland's eventual melt within the next century is unstoppable if we continue business as usual. The damage will be painfully huge with 7 meters of sea level rise. Slow climate change is no news compared to wars, oil prices, the stock market, job security.

The real story is that although many of us understand the consequences of a warming earth, we are still doing very little to change our future. This morning, I got in my car and went though the coffee drive-thru. The educated may be driving hybrids now, but they're still driving like everybody else. Even those of us who are aware are not taking charge or our futures. At what point will we?

(photo from Erin Pettit GOI 2006)

Road Salt and Crayon Factories

Today, the kids made hills. They stuffed garbage bags briming with newspaper and stretched out their lovely landscapes...perfectly ready for imaginary settlement and eventual industrialization...

I gave them a list of ingredients--- asking them, what role, or job, each ingredient should represent in our town. The ingredients and responses are below.

Coffee- Starbucks! Landscaping! Farming! (A holler came "do you even know what landscaping is?")
Soap- Houses. Hotels. (They both wash lots of towels!!)
Oil- Oil Refineries!!! (yes, this was yelled--- I must talk about oil a bit much)
Salt- Food for animals in farms... Road Salt!! (I'm so proud of the kid who said road salt, my eyes get a little misty--- in most states people have completely altered stream chemistry with road salt.
Powerade- A crayon factory (I went with it...)

The kids put these ingredients spread out on their landscape... And then it rained... and all of the ingredients merged into one lake in the middle of the mountain range. A few well placed factories were spared... but, most of the kids were living in the runoff of a crayon factory?

We're all in one big lake together. Sometimes the blue gets mixed in with the red... All of us a little bit more colorful for the experience...
(photo: http://www.worldvillage.com/wv/school/html/reviews/crayonf.htm)

Awake in the time of the bobbleheads

By 2050 the UN predicts global populations will reach 8.9 billion; a staggering increase of 2.1 billion people from today’s population. In the meantime, oil production in the Middle East is projected to more than half (Simmons & Company). Non OPEC supplies will not keep pace, our ability to discover new oil is outpaced by growing global demands. It is no wonder our President and Congress have called for energy “independence” by 2020. This will require more than a few new green communities and some work to develop hydrogen fuel cell. Our budgeted 2007 federal science and technology plus energy spending equal 26.1 billion or less than 1% of national spending. What do our political candidates propose to solve this? Or is the goal of energy independence as ambiguous as the advertisements?

Mentos in Lake Vostok

Ah Ha! Science thrills again! Today the fourth graders flung themselves at me with full-force for wowing them will Mentos and Diet Coke. After 2 spectacular eruptions- two kids erupted their own homemade volcanoes using standard volcano fare- vinegar and baking soda... I thought it would be a shame if they got sprayed with Diet Coke. Diet Coke carbonation is a great analogy for carbon dioxide release by real volcanoes...

All the Mentos and Coke got me thinking about my favorite lake... LAKE VOSTOK. A lake as large as Lake Michigan covered by two miles of ice!!!! What's in that pesky Lake--- much pressurized gas from dissolved rocks---That's a lot of carbon dioxide.... think about dropping many truckloads of Mentos into the lake.... and Wazammm!!! We won't have to resolve how to keep from contaminating the Lake anymore--- it will spray the entire continent...

Make your own glacier

When I first moved to Ohio my officemate, Jim, dubbed me "Ice". "Hey, Ice what are you up to later? "Ice, do you have lab today?" "Ice, are you going out this weekend?" After a few months, my name was officially Ice...at least to my officemates...

Today, although I have reclaimed my birthname, I feel a bit like "Ice". My nose dripping like summer melt... and more importantly, my freezer is growing a glacier. This is no broken defrost...this is an intentional glacier. Yesterday, I carefully scooped sand from our backyard (Trey is laying some pavers, so I had to be sneaky)... I was cautious not to scoop any worms, as this causes many young fourth and fifth graders to squirm. (Even if they would be tame and rigid). I spread sand in a cake pan, shallowly carpeting the entire bottom. Then, I poured in some water and carefully balance this concoction on the top rack of the freezer at a 30 degree angle--- propped strategically on an Eggo box. The water swooshed to the lowered end of the pan.... with any luck it will be well frozen today...Soon I will be tipping the pan in the opposite direction to see if the lovely beast will slide down the sand on its wet bed. Just in case, I'm bringing a hair blower to speed the process up...

However, this glacier is likely to be outtrumphed in the students eyes by the more gooey glacier idling in my refridgerator...(unless of course, I did miss a poor worm).... its amazing how glue, borax and water congeal into a wonderful example of glacier internal deformation....

This glacier was a pain to scrape from underneath my fingernails and out of my wedding ring... but it will impress the kids. And today, they will love science.

Slime: My new day job

This week I'm living under the pulsing neon of the windowless analytical lab(finishing up the Antarctic samples from last winter). Meanwhile I am washing bottles in three acid baths... each soak 1 week, then triple bagging them in ziplocks for Becki and Joel to take with them to Antarctica...these are cleannnnn bottles.

Why no ice this winter? A new endeavour--- I am a National Science Foundation GK-12 fellow (the simple explanation- I make bacterial gardens (above) and bring in dirt for kids to learn science from) I've got two classes from two Columbus Public schools. The kids are amazing--- they largely design their own experiments to study everything from erosion to food webs...

For this weeks activities, my rock loving husband is digging in the basement through his crates of rocks--- searching for trilobites... I am dividing brownie and cake mix into batches for the kids to make their own desert soil and muddy lake bottoms.... found some swedish fish for them to make into little sugary fossils.... a few of them experienced predation at the stake of my mouth...

Its really rewarding to do this work, a nice follow-up to Girls on Ice... and the kids are fun, inquisitive and sweet.

And I love our noxious gardens!!!! It reminds me of the primative begginings of our own planet and the strange brew of microbes living in anoxic conditions....

A little lab work never hurt, just need some more sun--- heading out to get some!

A goat in the mist

It’s cold, so cold the girl huddle close to the whisperlite stove, willing the water to boil. We are back at camp, after a long day in the field. It is Lucia’s turn to warm us up, the sixteen year-old has traveled to Mount Baker, Washington from Spain. We clap our hands together mimicking any movement that Lucia makes. As the laughing starts, the water boils, and we are ready to begin our evening discussion drinking tea and cocoa. I reflect on the long days hike over the Easton Glacier, our failed attempt to look at the Deming Glaicer, covered in thick clouds. The 9 high school girls kept their attitudes positive and we had a good time looking down crevasses and tracing Gatorade as it flowed around the ice crystal boundaries. There is so much to see that is immediately under our feet. The girls smile at each other and trade candy bars back and forth keeping warm in the near freezing mist.

We have been thinking about the connection between science, religion, and art, a discussion that started as we lunched and waited for clouds to lift at the Deming overlook. This is a staple question asked by Girls on Ice inventor Erin Pettit. For Erin, the world is an amazing place to explore, and unknown journey. It is nice for analytical me, to be reminded by Erin, CeCe, and the (brilliant) girls of how much we don’t know.

Lately, I have been strategizing ways to communicate science, especially global warming findings to the public. In doing this, I try not to deal too much with the unknown, and offer as many facts as I can to any ear that will listen. It is nice to shift focus for a while and think about how many things there really are left to understand, and how we are only just beginning to find out answers to some of the mysteries of the universe.

Over hot drinks, the girls share their insights on what defines a wilderness experience. The fog lifts slightly, and we are able to see the next moraine over. A mountain goat stands staring down at us. Quiet, and strong, and then back into the mist the goat disappears.

(the girls had to record their experiences for one day-so I thought I might too). The pictures don't match the day.