Planning for the pre-dissertation sabbatical

I met with Dr. Bryan Mark to discuss plans for traveling into the Andes. I will be flying into Lima on June 20th and meeting others from McGill University. Then after 2 field weeks (or 22 days) I will return with bags of water to analyze and breath-taking views to digest. All of this pre-dissertation sabbatical planning is going well and the bottles are piling up for a massive assessment of Andean water quality. I am also finalizing the last paper in my dissertation (unless I write a fourth...). Anyway, I am geeked out and my brain is already at high altitude... this is mostly because I saw a picture of the rise of the Cordillera Negra and the Cordillera Blanca that bisect Peru... in the middle of these two ranges is the valley we will be researching. The valley floor is at 11,300 ft. or well above the elevation of the famed Machu Picchu one of the last great Incan cities.

El deshielo de los todos glaciars de los montañas

Sueño los glaciars
(I dream the glaciers)
y
(&)
el deshielo de los todos
(they all melt)
Rios desaparecan
(rivers disappear)
y
el mundo es arido
(and the world is dry)
llorando y llorando
(we cry and we cry)

Climate, water, and carbon...

We got the tour of the North Appalachian Experimental watershed in Coshocton, Ohio last Monday. Watersheds are monitored for the complete hydrologic cycle. Below are pictures of the H-weir (blue) that measures surface runoff and the lysimeter that weighs and calculates the infiltration of water into the ground. We were lead beneath the ground via an old concrete stairwell to view the lysimeter.





























The experimental watershed is broken into various plots of different landuse, % clay, slope, and other attributes. Below are clumps of no-till soil compared with tilled soil. The no-till soil has many long burrows from worms.






























This is a plastic cast of one of the burrows made in the no till soil.



Because the water cycle and landuse are monitored, we will be able to determine much about the controls on the carbon cycle in response to landuse and other conditions.

Incan Bones

In June, I will examine water quality in a glacial melt stream and a non-glacial melt stream that converge to feed the Rio Santos, Cordillera Blanca, Peru. Dr. Bryan Mark has already examined the oxygen isotopic signal of these streams and found that during the summer melt season ~ 40% of the Rio Santos is glacial melt. The long term hydrograph suggests these contributions shift in response to climate, I hope to understand how the water quality shifts....compounding the issue, there is a nearby gold mine that may release metals into the stream(s)....this takes my hypothesizing back to Incan times when people were forced into hard labor in mines to meet the empires growing lust for silver. Did some of the Incans allegedly killed by old world disease actually die of metal poisoning?... not just those working in the mines, but those living downstream of deadly tailings...

I just need some Incan bones...

Corn Recon and preparing for Andean Adventures

First of all, I'm heading to the cornfields on Monday to scope out my future postdoctoral project site with Climate, Water, and Carbon program Drs. Rattan Lal, Berry Lyons, and Andrea Grotolli; others will be involved but this is Monday's crew. I will take pictures.

In the meantime, I am staring at the small bruises on my arms from Hepatitis shots (I should have had those shots 10 years ago when I was waste-deep in effluent (poop water) working with the USGS; but I have so far escaped the sequence because when I was 20 I thought I would never die, and my recent exposure to poop water has been very minimal. Other good news, I still do not have tuberculosis, my TB skin test is invisible. It has been a year of exotic travel (including my first trip to Clearwater Florida; which is extremely exotic if you count the alien living at Pier 60, Trey can impersonate him too well and I am little suspicious).

I should prepare physically for working in the Andes, but unlike previous field expeditions, this time I am heading out with other folks coming from flat Columbus....to prepare for my first Antarctic trip I made sure that I could do at least 6 pull-ups. I figured this would insure I could pull a 200 pound person+pack out of a crevasse, or at least stop the fall... Now, I am concentrating on being able to build my thumb strength (training undergraduates in master pipetting (using a suped-up eye dropper to measure chemicals), and of course, my other fingers are ever-agile from dissertating and now blogging.

Things to Come!

Many good things have been brewing over the last few weeks. In a few short months I will be finishing my PhD after working at Byrd Polar Research Center for 5 years (not completed consecutively...) Early in the summer, I will be heading to Peru with Bryan Mark and Jeff McKenzie to examine water quality issues associated with receding glaciers. After Peru, I will come back and defend my dissertation to be knighted with my PhD.

Then... I have accepted a carbon, water, and climate postdoctoral position at Ohio State. (http://www.cwc.osu.edu). I will be collaborating with many good people at OSU examining soil, atmospheric, and groundwater-riverine carbon and nitrogen fluxes associated with agricultural and other land use types. Meeting our growing food needs with more crops will have a big impact on climate and water quality. I plan to also lead undergraduate thesis work on other 'field studies' lest I suffer a student-withdrawal drought.

Persistence

I post this picture of what I would have worn to faculty prom had I been hired at the place that boasts its own faculty prom. Don't worry, although I'm not going to prom, I'm still wearing that wig.

I am surprised by the power of persistence. At 15, I wrote down a list of about 30 things that I wanted to do with my life including going to Antarctica and Mars. I have done most of these things, some after being rejected multiple times. The key is, knowing there are many ways to get where you set out to go.

Last week, co-led a hands-on glacier-flubber activity with gifted 8th grade girls. You could see their eyes light up as they explored how their glaciers responded to temperature, slope, and surfaces. They created their experiments, guided by their own growing interest in oozing goozing flubber. We challenged them to test their hypotheses and they did it fabulously!!!

Dr. Kathy Sullivan, was the keynote speaker for this event. Kathy was the first woman to walk in space (something I kick myself for not speaking with her about when on the way to Antarctica.) In one of her interviews she said don't let anyone "put you of your game and affect your path" Don't let anyone tell you what to do with your flubber.

Here's to enjoying the path!

Leaching Lead from Barbies?

Environmental lead pollution is so pervasive that we're (people and ecosystems) still suffering from our leaded gasoline and paint using days. Sadly, new sources of lead pollution still enter the environment via commercial products... including toys and toothbrushes. The US Senate has responded calling for greater consumer protection (NY Times 3/7/08). Will these measures be enough? And what was the delay? We've known lead in paint was bad news since the 1970s, especially for infants that crawl closer to lead-bearing soils and are prone to sticking things into their mouths...

For Environmental Geochemistry students: Take your favorite childhood toy. Stick it in a strong acid solution for a few days. Measure the lead concentration in the solution. Is your favorite toy safe? Construct an experiment to examine the timeline of lead pollution in that Barbie collection...or those Transformers...

Burrowing for Rawhides

Haven't seen this much snow in Ohio in a long time...

Midnight in the Valley of the Dead

Long shadows grow into darkness and the extended season in the Taylor Valley, Antarctica has begun...

Photos from the austral autumn take my mind into its joyful recesses... oh, how I am with them in spirit now!!!!

Check out the rotating pictures (at the bottom of the site) from friends staying for the extended season in Taylor Valley (this is the first time that the ecosystem will be observed "shutting down" in response to the steady loss of light.

www.mcmlter.org

Into the Water

Last summer was the summer our dog, Loki, learned how to swim. It was the hot dripping sky that forced us all to abandon land and swim in the turbid water.

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.