Environmental News
Environmental News from Boulder, Colorado
Deepwater Horizon lessons are subject of Jan. 26 lecture at CU-Boulder
Jan 17th
The University of Colorado Boulder will host a free public lecture this month illuminating the lessons learned from the April 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion that killed 11 workers and resulted in the largest accidental oil spill in U.S. history.
Called “What Happened at Deepwater Horizon?” the event will be presented Jan. 26 from 6:30 to 9 p.m. in the Mathematics Building auditorium, room 100.
Donald Winter, former secretary of the Navy, professor of engineering practice at the University of Michigan and chair of the National Academies committee that wrote a report on the Deepwater Horizon accident, will be the first of two guest speakers.
The report, issued last month, points to multiple flawed decisions leading to the blowout and explosion, and calls for a new “system safety” approach to anticipating and managing possible dangers at every level of operation.
A second guest speaker will be Paul Hsieh, a research hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey who was named 2011 Federal Employee of the Year. Hsieh performed the crucial calculations on pressure that deemed it safe to cap the oil well in mid-July without causing it to rupture from beneath the seabed and result in a bigger disaster.
Two CU-Boulder environmental engineering faculty who have been researching the aftermath of the incident also will present their findings at the event. Fernando Rosario-Ortiz will discuss the environmental fate of dispersants used in the disaster response and Alina Handorean will present information on air quality impacts of the oil spill.
“I was really jarred by this event because it was so preventable,” said event co-organizer Jana Milford, professor and director of the Environmental Engineering Program at CU-Boulder. “By learning more about what happened, I think we can encourage a stronger culture around safety.”
The event is presented by the College of Engineering and Applied Science, the BOLD Center, the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Environmental Engineering Program.
For more information or to request accommodations for disabilities call 303-492-4774.
CU: Out with the old, in with the “new” journalism
Jan 11th
SHOULD BE COMPETENT IN THE DISCIPLINES THEY REPORT ON, ACCORDING TO PLAN
As a new year and the spring semester begin, the University of Colorado Boulder is welcoming the first class of journalism students entering under a new undergraduate degree structure called “Journalism Plus” that CU officials say will create better journalists, better news content and, over time, a more informed society.Currently, more than 45 new students are expected to enroll for spring semester under the new Journalism Plus requirements. Journalism Plus stipulates that students supplement their journalism degree requirements with an additional field of study in a specific arts and sciences discipline, an approach that Journalism Director Chris Braider says will make better journalists and communication professionals, better university students and better citizens.
“Journalism Plus ensures that the journalists and communicators CU produces will not only possess the updated skills they need to create and deliver messages, but will also possess the analytical abilities, research tools and knowledge of a subject to communicate something of value in those messages,” Braider said.
Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward–the
“old” journalism?
“Our students will understand, with depth and context, the content they will create as journalists. We think this will set them apart from other journalism programs across the nation.”
Journalism and Mass Communication will continue to grant the Bachelor of Science degree in one of five sequences: advertising, broadcast news, broadcast production, media studies and news-editorial. Under the new requirements, students also will enroll in a 30- to 33-credit-hour additional field of study, the equivalent of work in a major in a discipline of their choice — anything from English, physics and history to political science, environmental studies or film studies.
Students admitted prior to spring 2012 have until May of 2016 to earn a degree under the former requirements, or they can elect to complete the Journalism Plus degree requirements.
The changes, say CU-Boulder Provost Russell L. Moore, were deliberate and in line with CU’s larger goals for its students.
“We want CU-Boulder students to be both knowledgeable and engaged in the world they live in,” said Moore. “So the goal for us was never to make journalism go away, but to pair it with a discipline that would add the depth of knowledge of a liberal arts degree to the skills developed in a journalism curriculum.
Lyndsay Lohan is news? Who decides?
I think this is going to answer a call we’ve heard from media professionals — don’t just send us skilled graduates, send us graduates who can interpret and understand the information they gather with some depth and context.”
At a practical level, Braider says, this will mean better, more contextual reporting to inform and shape our democratic society.
“In this model, science writers will possess first-hand knowledge of the sciences they report on,” Braider said. “Reporters covering government or business will bring an in-depth knowledge of political science and economics to the events they chronicle. Advertisers and graphic designers will explore the full range of expressive arts on which their professions rely.”
As Journalism Plus is implemented, more students will be admitted directly to Journalism and Mass Communication as freshmen.
The university is continuing on a path to creating a new interdisciplinary college or school of information, communications, journalism, media and technology, which will one day house journalism and companion disciplines in an environment of sharing, innovation and scholarship.
Journalism and Mass Communication continues to be accredited by the Accrediting Council on Education for Journalism and Mass Communications. In two years, the accrediting council will make a determination on accreditation for the following four years.
Mini quakes to shimmy the Rio Grand rift
Jan 11th
IN COLORADO AND NEW MEXICO, NEW STUDY SAYS
The Rio Grande Rift, a thinning and stretching of Earth’s surface that extends from Colorado’s central Rocky Mountains to Mexico, is not dead but geologically alive and active, according to a new study involving scientists from the University of Colorado Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.
“We don’t expect to see a lot of earthquakes, or big ones, but we will have some earthquakes,” said CU-Boulder geological sciences Professor Anne Sheehan, also a fellow at CIRES. The study also involved collaborators from the University of New Mexico, New Mexico Tech, Utah State University and the Boulder-headquartered UNAVCO. The Rio Grande Rift follows the path of the Rio Grande River from central Colorado roughly to El Paso before turning southeast toward the Gulf of Mexico.
Sheehan was not too surprised when a 5.3 magnitude earthquake struck about 9 miles west of Trinidad, Colo., in the vicinity of the Rio Grande Rift on Aug. 23, 2011. The quake was the largest in Colorado since 1967 and was felt from Fort Collins to Garden City, Kan.
Along the rift, spreading motion in the crust has led to the rise of magma — the molten rock material under Earth’s crust — to the surface, creating long, fault-bounded basins that are susceptible to earthquakes, said Sheehan, a study co-author and also associate director of the CIRES Solid Earth Sciences Division. The team studied the Rio Grande Rift region to assess the potential earthquake hazards.
Using Global Positioning System instruments at 25 sites in Colorado and New Mexico, the team tracked the rift’s miniscule movements from 2006 to 2011. “Questions we wanted to answer are whether the Rio Grande Rift is alive or dead, how is it deforming and whether it is opening or not,” said Sheehan.
The high-precision instrumentation has provided unprecedented data about the volcanic activity in the region. Previously, geologists had estimated the rift had spread apart by up to 2 inches or 5 millimeters each year, although the errors introduced by the scientific instruments were known to be significant. “The GPS used in this study has reduced the uncertainty dramatically,” Sheehan said.
Using the latest high-tech instrumentation, the scientists found an average strain rate of 1.2 “nanostrain” each year across the experimental area, the equivalent of about one-twentieth of an inch, or 1.2 millimeters, over a length of about 600 miles. “The rate is lower than we thought but it does exist,” Sheehan said.
The researchers also found the extensional deformation, or stretching, is not concentrated in a narrow zone centered on the Rio Grande Rift but is distributed broadly from the western edge of the Colorado Plateau well into the western Great Plains. “The surprising thing to come out of the study was that the strain was so spread out,” Sheehan said.
Results of the study are published in the January edition of the journal Geology.
The team plans to continue monitoring the Rio Grande Rift, probing whether the activity remains constant over time, said lead study author Henry Berglund of UNAVCO, who was a graduate student at CU-Boulder working at CIRES when he completed this portion of the research. Also, the team may attempt to determine vertical as well as horizontal activity in the region to tell whether the Rocky Mountains are still uplifting or not, Berglund said.
“Present-day measurements of deformation within continental interiors have been difficult to capture due to the typically slow rates of deformation within them,” Berglund said. “Now with the recent advances in space geodesy we are finding some very surprising results in these previously unresolved areas.”
As far as the potential for future earthquakes in the region, the study’s results are unequivocal, however. “The rift is still active,” Sheehan said.
The new study also is co-authored by CU-Boulder Associate Professor and CIRES Fellow Steven Nerem, Frederick Blume of UNAVCO, Anthony Lowry of Utah State University, Mousumi Roy of the University of New Mexico and Mark Murray of New Mexico Tech.
The National Science Foundation provided the funding for this study and the NSF-funded EarthScope program and UNAVCO provided instruments, equipment and engineering services. The Boulder-headquartered UNAVCO is a nonprofit, university-governed consortium that facilitates geosciences research and education.
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