Tech & Science
Technology and Science news from Boulder, Colorado
C.U. Team on a 2 Year effort to research environment factors
Jan 25th
Jan. 25, 2012
CU-BOULDER-LED TEAM TO ASSESS DECLINE OF
ARCTIC SEA ICE IN ALASKA’S BEAUFORT SEA
A national research team led by the University of Colorado Boulder is embarking on a two-year, multi-pronged effort to better understand the impacts of environmental factors associated with the continuing decline of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean.
The team will use tools ranging from unmanned aircraft and satellites to ocean buoys in order to understand the characteristics and changes in Arctic sea ice, which was at 1.67 million square miles during September 2011, more than 1 million square miles below the 1979-2000 monthly average sea ice extent for September — an area larger than Texas and California combined. Critical ocean regions north of the Alaskan coast, like the Beaufort Sea and the Canada Basin, have experienced record warming and decreased sea ice extent unprecedented in human memory, said CU-Boulder Research Professor James Maslanik, who is leading the research effort.
The team will be targeting the Beaufort Sea, considered a “marginal ice zone” where old and thick multiyear sea ice has failed to survive during the summer melt season in recent years, said Maslanik of CU-Boulder’s Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research in CU’s engineering college. Such marginal ice zones are characterized by extensive ice loss and a strong “ice-albedo” feedback.
“Sea ice is lost when the darker ocean absorbs more sunlight in the form of heat in the summers, resulting in potentially thinner sea ice that re-forms the following winter,” Maslanik said. “This positive feedback between heat absorption by the ocean and accelerated melting becomes reinforcing in itself.” Marginal ice zones also are characterized by significant human and marine mammal activity, he said.
There was a record loss of sea ice cover over the Arctic in 2007, he said. “In some areas of the Arctic Ocean the multiyear ice rebounded, but in the Beaufort Sea we did not see that kind of multiyear ice persistence like we used to see,” said Maslanik, who also is a research professor in the aerospace engineering sciences department.
“The biggest question is whether places like the Beaufort Sea and adjacent Canada Basin have passed a ‘tipping point’ and now are essentially sub-Arctic zones where ice disappears each summer,” he said. Such ice loss could be causing fundamental changes in ocean conditions, including earlier annual blooms of phytoplankton, which are microscopic plant-like organisms that drive the marine food web.
The vast majority of climate scientists believe shrinking Arctic sea ice in recent decades is due to rising temperatures primarily caused by human activities that pump huge amounts of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The new $3 million study led by Maslanik, “The Marginal Ice Zone Observations and Processes EXperiment,” or MIZOPEX, is being funded by NASA.
The team will undertake extensive airborne surface mapping using a variety of Unmanned Aircraft Systems, or UAS, comparing the results with data collected by a fleet of satellites from NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Japanese space agency. Unlike satellites, small, unmanned aircraft can fly below the clouds, observe the same location continuously for hours and make more precise measurements of sea ice composition and sea surface temperatures. Maslanik and his CU-Boulder team previously used unmanned aircraft to assess ice conditions both in the Arctic and in Antarctica.
The MIZOPEX arsenal also will include floating buoys that measure ocean temperatures. CU-Boulder engineering faculty members Scott Palo and Dale Lawrence and their graduate students are converting miniaturized versions of dropsondes — standard weather reconnaissance devices designed to be dropped from aircraft and capture data as they fall toward Earth — into the buoys that will be deployed by the UAS.
The modified dropsondes, which were developed at CU-Boulder for use in Antarctica, will be combined with CU-designed miniature unmanned aircraft that will land on the ocean near sea ice floes. Such floes are critical to several species of Arctic wildlife, including polar bears, walruses and seals.
The buoys and unmanned craft will collect sea surface and subsurface temperatures to about a meter deep, while the overflying unmanned planes and satellites measure temperatures at the surface, Maslanik said. “We want to know if the warming is just at the ocean surface or if there is additional heat getting into the mixed layers of the upper ocean, either from absorbed sunlight or from ocean currents, that could be contributing to sea ice melt.”
The team plans to gather information over 24-hour cycles to determine how the ocean and ice are reacting to atmospheric changes. “Understanding what’s happening in the water is critical to forecasting what will happen to ice in the near term, as well as in the decades to come,” said MIZOPEX team scientist Betsy Weatherhead of CU-Boulder’s Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences.
“We’ve never had the data before,” Weatherhead said. “With this new instrumentation, we’ll be able to ask questions and test theories about the drivers of ice melt.”
The MIZOPEX effort involves CU-Boulder, NASA, Fort Hays State University in Kansas, Brigham Young University, the University of Alaska-Fairbanks, NOAA, the University of Washington and Columbia University. Ball Aerospace Systems Group of Boulder also is collaborating on the project.
Other MIZOPEX project scientists from CU include Brian Argrow, Sandra Castro, Ian Crocker, William Emery, Eric Frew and Mark Tschudi. Argrow directs the CU-headquartered Research and Engineering Center for Unmanned Vehicles, a university-government-industry partnership for the development and application of unmanned vehicle systems.
For more information on MIZOPEX visit http://ccar.colorado.edu/mizopex/index.html.
For more information on CU-Boulder’s Research and Engineering Center for Unmanned Vehicles visit http://recuv.colorado.edu/.
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.