Tooling Around

Yesterday, I gave a talk to the home crowd on the dustiest polar glaciers on earth, the great analogues for Martian life (I'm working on my marketing skills for future endeavors). My adviser is back from his tour del tropicos so it was a good time to present. Great feedback!--- Including from Bill Showers, he stuck around for my talk... I'm still drooling over the auto-nitrate analyzer Bill uses in his studies. It will revolutionize future stream studies- best capturing pulse events (and be easy for students to use!!!). I am auctioning off my doll collection to buy one... no seriously, I will write a grant proposal for this one.

In the final stretch of PhD-land, I am building greater context for the stream chemistry story in the McMurdo Dry Valleys... although the dry valleys have been dry valleys for millions of years they are projected to respond to future global climate change... and I do have some data from the melt year to project metal fluxes with....and I do have some smart friends to collaborate with...

My coffee breath is getting to me, so I'm done tooling for now.

Fertilize the earth- the wetlands might save us...

Yesterday, I heard the most fantastic talk on nitrate! And it ties in well with a previous post this week on wetlands (the great filters and transformers of human derived pollutants). First, some background: nitrogen in our atmosphere is fixed by microbes and then utilized by all forms of life. It is an essential fertilizer. However, the burning of fossil fuels and our use of fertilizers for agricultural and other things have overwhelmed the natural nitrogen cycle. This is primarily indicated by the surplus of nitrate (for instance, in the Mount Hood Snow I collected a few summers ago, there was clearly enrichments in nitrate from fossil fuel burning). Humans presently dominate the earth's major geochemical cyles- (Vitousek and others, 1997)

Dr. Bill Showers from North Carolina State University is studying nitrate in the Neuse River Basin, NC. Bill's research group studied runoff from an area where biosolids (or the end-product of wastewater management) are applied on soils. (They know exactly how much nitrate is in these biosolids). The surprising results: groundwater, not not surface runoff, contribute most of the nitrate to the Neuse River.

Bill and his group also found that the locations where nitrate-rich biosolids were applied showed little relation to the nitrate in the stream water. The stronger control on stream chemistry was the type of soil. Water-loving soils retained the most nitrate, keeping it from reaching the streams. So, Bill and his team are going to engineer wetlands to create hydric soils and measure their capacity to retain nitrate and improve stream water quality......

The biggest, scariest conclusion of Bill's talk was that by 2050 fertilizer, sludge, wastewater, and even groundwater are going to pale in comparison to atmospheric nitrate flux. This is very, very bad for us with the nitrate concentrations in many watersheds already reaching toxic levels (think- blue baby syndrome).

The tufa part is over

Ah, this calls for a geology pun. I'm done with most of my dissertation. It all goes to the committee in April. Now back to work for the margin police! Pretty soon I'm going back to the painting postcards hobby... this writing to break from writing is....(I'm not sure I have an end for the sentence. ..)

Phreatomagmatic Petrologist and Locust-eyed Geochemist

I really like having locust eyes... as I remember, Trey mentioned that it might be good to take those off for the picture. On the other hand, you can't see his eyes either...fortunately, we've evolved, and 6 years later, we have eyes...

Dalmations and Cougars and Worms- Oh My!

The Fouse Elementary School Cougar and Dalmatian are back after a strange journey to the Antarctic underworld. The visited with the mighty Wurm (pictured below), the ruler of the soil underworld in the Antarctic polar desert. Wurm and his friends are better known as Scottnema to lovers of all things that sneak in the soil. Anyway, I am glad the Dalmatian and Cougar made it back safely because I can always use more help in the lab. Yesterday, might have been the end of it all, if not for the yawn that overtook my brain.
For more about Wurm and his friends check out this link put together by my worm-herding cohorts (led by the superb Dr. Diana Wall):
http://nemablog.wordpress.com/

Or learn more about the Antarctic dry valleys from the engaging Dr. Becky Ball from the Dartmouth Soil Chemistry Group (led by the wonderful Dr. Ross Virginia):
http://polarsoils.blogspot.com/

On the shoulders of giants

Admittedly, I am blogging a lot lately. Either it's all the time in the lab, or because I feel a bit like I'm in some jaw-dropping location. The possibilities!!! My adviser, Berry, was very, very kind in the meeting we held to set my dissertation defense date. And it seems whatever road I take, I have his full support as well the others in my committee (and my family).

Now, more than ever, I am filled with thoughts of guiding students. I am setting goals and taking measures to conduct purposeful research with young people. Every route I conjure is filled with this.

Preservation

It's approaching...at least entering the periphery of my thoughts... Girl's Explore Archeology Day. For activity planning, I left an apple outside to rot in my backyard over the weekend. I am going to wrap another one in modeling clay next week and see how it fairs in comparison. I wonder if it will stop the apple from oxidizing? I suspect apple mummies could be good smelly fun. Although, this will pale in comparison to making batteries from the lunch items of 5th graders. Stench, unless it is gut-wrenching, is very affective at capturing the interest of younger students.... and myself....

Spring

The recent thaw-induced sidewalk ooze of salt and eroding concrete pulls my thoughts to spring. Here's a picture (of Becki) I took in March (2005) from Death Valley during the 100 year wildflower bloom. What joy!

Glacier wetlands and ecosystem services

Wetlands capture metals either in sediment and/or to be taken up by plants... furthermore, amazingly bad organic compounds (often generated by human industrial activity) are completely transformed into much safer entities. Nature's filtration is often much more efficient and better at treating poor water quality than human created replacements. In 1997, Costanza and others calculated that the value of all ecosystem services (from improving water quality to preventing erosion) were approximately $33 Trillion/yr (or almost twice the global GNP). This is likely an underestimate for several reasons they mention in their paper including that ecosystems as modeled are deemed to not have sharp thresholds at which they can no longer provide services.

One critical question is: to what extent is human alteration of landscape capable of improving ecosystem services? (e.g. is Green city-planning a potential solution to the biogeochemical damage that humans create? )

Anyway, on the pristine side of the equation, I am looking at elemental data as it comes out- (so I can't be quoted on this just yet) it looks like the big ponds on the glacier surfaces are the wetlands of the dry valley glaciers retaining metals and organisms...

Lab Work

This is it! The last lab run for my dissertation (it will take about three 20 hour days---a better alternative to 10-12 eight hour days--- it takes a long time to calibrate, so I try to stay on the SF-ICPMS as long as possible). My flat buddies decided they would help me glove up... but as you can see it wasn't as straight forward as I anticipated...it might be a long 20 hours...

Science Budget Shuffle

On February 4th, Bush sent the FY09 Budget request to Congress. This means a shuffle of money for the sciences with the DOE expecting gains (avert the energy crisis) and losses for the DIH and USGS (among others). What can we do? I am particularly upset that the Nataional Water Quality Assessment Program (NAWQA) will suffer budget reductions of over $10 Million (with a new annual budget of 54.1 Million). During the summer I was 19, I worked for the Minnesota NAWQA as a UNIX-GIS mapper as part of an effort to monitor the health of the Red River and Mississippi Basins. A few years later, I found my way back to NAWQA as a undergraduate hydrology employee for the Wisconsin office. Maybe I was young and impressionable, but my memory hasn't faded. I cannot say enough about NAWQA and the importance of their efforts. The long term data sets established by NAWQA provide a sense of the changing quality of our waterways through time and space. This information is necessary to evaluate our past, current, and future water management practices. NAWQA also provides a baseline of hydrology data that complements new research on hot topics.

In Science Magazine, the Chief Executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), Alan Leshner, urged (2/15/08)

"We should take up "glocal" science advocacy to complement the traditional approach. This strategy involves taking a global issue and making it meaningful to society at the local level. Scientists and citizen advocates should recruit their nonscience friends and neighbors to promote science funding to decision-makers. Recruiting efforts can be as simple as discussing science-related issues at dinner parties or as ambitious as meeting with community groups, school boards, or city council members. The appeal should be locally focused for two important reasons: Policy-makers often seem to listen better in their home districts, where they are less distracted by the press of life on Capitol Hill; and they need to see clearly that science funding is not only a national but a local issue for all their constitutents, not just those who are scientists."

As mentors to K-12 and undergraduate students, we must build classes with local relevance... this is especially important to introductory science classes, where students may receive their only exposure to conducting, evaluating, and valuing scientific research.

Relax

It's time to put a wig on and relax. To my fellow PhD students and early career scientist friends, or anyone who likes to perpetually challenge themselves to do better, we owe it to ourselves.
I'm surprisingly attached to the future right now and conjuring scenarios (one in particular) in which I can lead students in research. This causes me to write at insane speeds (trying to mass publicize to catch up with those 5 years ahead of me) and also has led to an increase in weekly mileage that parallels peak week in marathon training. I suspect I will run the Athens, Ohio Marathon in April to capitalize on my granite hams.
Looking for a picture for a talk, I came across this oldie- but goodie... Sadly, the scientist standing in the left has passed away, hit by a car while out for a jog--- after surviving many deep-field misadventures subsisting on bumper bars (a butter-based granola bar) in the middle of the TransAntarctics.

Anyway, this picture reminds me that my life is good, our lives are short... and a wig never hurt.